Every Bob Dylan Song

Bob Dylan Song #174: Simple Twist of Fate

2011-11-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

FYI: this was, and is, her favorite Dylan song.

And, from the grand and sweeping epic of "Tangled Up in Blue", we immediately delve into something far more intimate and self-contained, the short story to that first song's Great American Novel. "Simple Twist of Fate" can probably be read in two different ways, depending on (I suppose) your level of cynicism - a man waxing poetic about a one-night stand, or even a night with a prostitute (assuming that prostitutes tend to ply their trades on the docks; I guess my knowledge of the world's oldest profession is not as deep as it ought to be?), or a couple having one last final fling in a "strange hotel" (or "old hotel" in later live versions) before the female walks away, never to return. Either way, this leaves the man both condemned to spend his life searching for this woman, and wondering about that "simple twist of fate", the moment that brought them together and allowed two diverging paths to oh so briefly intersect. The interpretations are different; the upshot is basically the same.

I personally like to go with the "one night stand" interpretation, even though you don't normally get lasting romance out of that sort of thing, and here's why. Those that have read my blog from the start probably remember my discourse about the famous "white parasol" speech by Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane (here's the post in question - thrill at how much I wrote back then!), where I talked about regret and about the past and how those things inform your life no matter whether you want them to or not (most likely not). But what it also reminded me about, in a way not just tied to talking about "the past" as an all-encompassing concept, is the idea of how something so innocuous can stay with you forever. Now, clearly a one-night stand has a bit more emotional resonance than simply seeing some woman holding a fancy umbrella getting off a boat, but in the grand scheme of things it might very well be the same - a brief moment, not totally shared (we'll get to that below), that carries a disproportionate amount of meaning for the beholder. There's something romantic to that, almost as romantic as the idea of a couple in that hotel room - it's better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all, so they say, but it could almost be even better to have not loved and lost to never have loved at all. I think.

Getting back to the song proper, what makes this particular song so great, at least to my ears, is the little details Dylan sprinkles into this song, avoiding some sort of uber-narrative and instead making every line come alive in your mind. This is not new to a Dylan song, certainly, but in this particular case, perhaps spurred on by memory of his own, Dylan really lays the richness of his word-painting power on thick. You can actually see the two of them, perhaps holding hands, staring up at the bright neon of the motel that they're planning on booking a room in (perhaps a married couple giving one last shot at spicing up a crumbling relationship?), slight befuddlement on their faces as the lights hit their eyes. You can hear the coin the woman drops rattling around in the tin cup of the beggar outside the arcade she walks down, never to see the man again, while he slowly wakes up to an empty bed. And you can watch the man wandering along past ships and dinghies and maybe even luxury yachts, perhaps with that parrot perched on his shoulder (forever the dopiest part of the song - does anyone REALLY miss it when he omits it during live performances?), searching in vain for a woman brought to him by circumstance and torn away by conscious decision (which, in its own way, is the most heartbreaking part of the whole thing...).

Actually, let me get to that last part for a second. Now, seeing as this is an album that deals with breakups and such, it's obviously going to have moments of heartbreak all throughout, so a few more instances aren't going to really stand out in theory. But what makes these moments stand out in their own way is just how quietly devastating they are, how they don't go for histrionics but simply portray how love can rip your heart out at a whisper and not just at a scream. Think about that line - "and forgot about a simple twist of fate" - and what that actually carries. The man, clearly, is doomed to always remember it (and it's always been interesting to me how the song switches from third person to first person for the final verse, like he was trying to tell a story to someone and make it out to be fiction, then just said "ah, fuck it, it's about me") and to chase the woman forever linked to her by it for all time, but for that woman it's already gone from her mind. That's just crushing to me; one person forever bound, the other like it never happened. And let's not forget the moment where the man wakes up, sees she's gone, and tells himself that he just doesn't care, even though the emptiness within him says otherwise. Self-denial is always a painful thing, especially when it comes to this sort of thing, and you can just feel the hurt this man feels as he tries to lie to the one person it's hardest to lie to.

I didn't talk about this in the previous post, so I suppose I should finish with a few words about the lyrical variations Bob throws in while performing this song in concert (courtesy of the amazing Dylanchords, of course). You've got the failed experiments of the 1984 shows, yet another reason why that tour more or less deserves to be forgotten - Dylan, rather than keeping the low-key philosophical vibe of the original, tries to a) build a real narrative and b) really go to the philosophical well, all to the song's detriment. And then you've got the odder moments, where Bob both adds a measure of vitriol (that 1980 "look that can manipulate" - it's like the '60s Bob never left!) and removes a bit of soul from the song (replacing the verse about not really caring and emptiness inside with a softer, kinda lamer verse about putting his shoes on and finding a note "to which he just could not relate" - falling prey to that old movie narrative mistake of telling and not showing), throwing the song off-kilter pretty much because he's Bob Dylan and that's how he does things. But, even with all of those changes (and the "she should have caught me in my prime" change to the final verse, which actually does add something in that we're now talking about young, dumb love instead of older, slightly less dumb love), the meat and heart of the song is still there, the man always bound to hold on to that one night forever, and the woman always a million miles away.

Bonus! Here's video of one of Dylan's great one-off performances: his performance of Simple Twist of Fate from the World of John Hammond PBS performance in 1975. Scarlet Rivera plays her gypsy violin, Rob Stoner plays on bass, and Howie Wyeth plays drums - a miniature dress rehearsal for the Rolling Thunder Revue, in other words. Enjoy!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xfv0p_dylan-simple-twist-of-fate_music

Bob Dylan Song #173: Tangled Up in Blue

2011-08-24T01:13:00.000-07:00

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

(1)

So about four months ago in the post for "Dirge", a commenter named Tim (presumably not this Tim or this Tim, though one never knows, does one) posted a very lucid analysis of the song, and then made this observation at the end:

"Perhaps none of you who have commented so far have ever fallen in love against your better judgment, when you have every reason to not do so. (Or remained in love with someone who broke your heart - that should strike a chord with Tony, as unrequited (?) love seems to have substantially changed the pace of output of this blog.)"

I didn't then, and still don't really now, know how to respond to that comment, although I have no qualms in saying that he's pretty close to the truth, if a little too uncomfortably on the nose. Then again, these posts are written for public consumption, and any such consumption will bear forth analysis by the readers (a point which has obvious implications for what I'm about to write about), so I can't really be too put off by a reader attempting to decipher my mindset in the same way that I've been attempting (or "attempting", depending on how you feel about my (fill in the blank) post) to decipher our man Bob's. I have no problem admitting that I've explored my own romantic foibles through Bob's music, which surely makes me no different from many of you reading this blog right now; as I've stated a couple times during this project, Bob touches on so many parts of what makes us human that it only seems natural to do this. His pain and emotions and feelings often help serve as a kind of therapy and catharsis for us, both consciously and unconsciously. This is true for many great musicians and their fans.

However, the main reason it has taken me so long to write this post is that, plain and simple, I have been absolutely dreading it. I mean, what is there to say about Blood on the Tracks that has not been said? Any Dylan fan that isn't a total neophyte knows everything about this album, about how Dylan wrote a bunch of songs about his deteriorating marriage (whether he wants to admit it or not); how he recorded an entire album's worth of material in New York, only to pull a 180 and re-record a number of the tunes in Minneapolis with local session musicians; how hordes of music critics and listeners alike have been trying to decipher the more cryptic lyrics on the album ever since; how the album hit #1 and served as linchpin to Dylan's second creative Renaissance; how Dylan uttered the infamous quote "A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album. It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying that type of pain, you know?" (which, given how much of popular music is about that type of pain, makes me wonder why Dylan would ever say something so strange); and how the album still regularly tops or hovers near the top of both "best Dylan album" and "best album ever" lists 35-plus years after its release. John Updike famously wrote about Ted Williams that "Gods do not answer letters", and yet here is Dylan, reporting back to us mere mortals about his pain in the way only he can, like a long-lost friend catching you up on the really crappy year he's been having with the humor, pathos, and intelligence of the kind of long-lost friend you'd want to reconnect with in the first place. Writing about this album is kinda like writing about Gettysburg or The Godfather at this point - any new insight will pretty much be discovered by accident.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to try, though. For one thing, my small-yet-loyal base of readers (bless every one of you) would absolutely and rightly pillory me if I didn't at least make a good faith attempt at trying to talk about what I consider Dylan's crowning achievement as a recording artist. But the main reason why I want to give this album its due is because (presumably despite Dylan's perplexity in this regard) I consider Blood on the Tracks to be part of my societal DNA, as much an influence on my life as anything I've ever heard, seen, or read in my lifetime, and something that has helped me deal with my own personal pain and heartache and what have you. I know I am not alone in this and that many of you feel the same way; and while I realize the limitations of this blog and that I'm not exactly performing some kind of great boon to the world by writing it, knowing how many people that DO read this blog feel the same way as I do raises the stakes, even just a little bit. And if those that read this and the next nine entries in this blog are helped in any small way emotionally by what I have to say, then it has to be worth it, right?

One more word about Blood on the Tracks, the album/social phenomenon/what have you. If I had to describe this album to someone without saying "it's his breakup album" or something similar, I'd probably describe it as "a Dylan album for people that don't like Bob Dylan". Hear me out on this - what do we usually think of as the public's conception of Bob Dylan, as opposed to our own conceptions of Bob Dylan? For me, when I think of the mainstream and how they view Bob, it's usually "the old guy with the funny voice that wrote those weird songs"; obviously that's unfair and staggeringly incorrect (except, perhaps, for the "weird songs" part), but the mainstream has a funny way of eliminating nuance in forming a reputation (and why I've heard so many terrible Bob voice parodies in my lifetime). And then there's Blood on the Tracks, where Bob's voice is in remarkably fine form, where he's singing about things everyone can understand, and where poetic, occasionally outre (though downright Mamet-ian compared to what came before) lyrics replace all that shit about Napoleon and motorcycle black Madonnas and whatever the fuck else. You can like this album without liking Bob Dylan or the rest of his catalog, which is not something you can say in general. I don't know, I think that's an interesting notion.

So on we go, then, into Dylan's little universe of romantic entanglement, broken hearts, unchecked anger and bile, deep soul searching, and maybe even a little spiritual peace mixed in somewhere. We all know this album inside and out; I see no need in trying to describe how it sounds to your ears and in your mind. So let's try to see how this album sounds to our hearts and our shared experiences instead. After all, that's what was on Dylan's mind when he wrote it - his own broken, bitter, and weary heart.

(2)

And thus we start with "Tangled Up in Blue" - one of Dylan's most famous album openers, maybe his most famous song, and one of the few contenders for "best Dylan song" that is a plausible alternative to "Like a Rolling Stone". That's a lot of very important descriptors, very hard ones to live up to, and yet I think that "Tangled Up in Blue" manages to live up to all of them. It's basically the perfect distillation of everything that Dylan was trying for on this album, where his newfound, more direct songwriting style (as unveiled in Planet Waves) mixed with the poetic style he developed in his earlier career, fueled by the obvious preoccupation on his mind (the crumbling of his marriage, of course - as opposed to, say, his preoccupation with New Orleans titty bars or obscure Brooklyn streets), producing an epic masterpiece that feels like the best romantic drama you'll never see in your life. That's really no small feat.

What I also like about "Tangled Up in Blue", and I'm not sure if this makes a ton of sense (but when has that ever stopped me?), is that it manages to play as a six-minute trailer for the rest of the album, setting the tone for the album both in its ability to tell compelling song-stories and to hint at both the weary despair and occasional optimism that informs the nine other songs (though without some of the bile that also informs the other nine songs, thankfully - I don't think acidic insults would've fit too well here). You've got the, yes, cinematic scope of something like "Simple Twist of Fate", the aching loss of "If You See Her, Say Hello", and the emotional reach of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go", all rolled up into seven of the best verses you will ever hear a human being sing in your life. Even the title of the song pretty much sums up the album, in all its heartbroken glory - a song cycle dedicated to the thorny, knotty issue of trying to deal with lost love and the path of carnage it leaves behind. That, too, is no small feat.

I imagine that I'm not the only person to have thought of this before, but the feature of "Tangled Up in Blue" that has become most appealing to me after the umpteenth listen is that it's, to me at least, a brilliant example of a circular narrative (see this article for a scholarly and occasionally confusing example of how circular narratives work in film), a story that bounces all over the place and only really "ends" because Dylan decided "hey, probably a good point to stop singing and give 'em one more harmonica solo" at a certain point. That's not to say that you can't take the song at face value, of course, and think of it as a tale of a man that divorces his wife, meets her in a random topless place (always my least favorite part of the song, for some reason), moves in with her and some third guy in what can only be described as a "reverse Three's Company", and then ends up moving on again, presumably in search of her or someone like her. But I like to think of the song as a jumbled-up narrative, one not meant to be taken at face value, in which any number of what we consider signposts in telling a Tale of Lost Love (the meeting, the breakup, the third man) are thrown all over the place, making us wonder if it was that man on Montague Street she was married to when they first met, or at what point the narrator was lying in bed thinking of that redhead that stole his heart. It might not make a lot of sense, but it's more fun that way.

And, in a strange way, more honest. Love narratives tend to be neat and tidy because we expect them to be neat and tidy; just like nobody likes a storyteller that leaves out important details and then has to double back once he's remembered them, nobody particularly likes to watch or hear about a love story that starts with "we moved in together", then jumps to "she threw my clothes out into the street", then back to "our boss set us up together, funny enough". But that, of course, is so often how our memories tend to work when it comes to relationships, isn't it? Nobody, when thinking to themselves about a current or former love, says to themselves "well, guess I'd better start from the beginning - so I was taking in my dry cleaning when this lovely buxom lass caught my eye..." (at least, I hope not, because that's some Rain Man type stuff right there). Reminiscences have a funny way of not adhering to a storyline, more so as a particular moment within that storyline, like a random YouTube clip pulled out of a movie because it's got a funny quote or something blowing up in it. And when we go long form and start piecing together how a relationship either came together or failed, this is how we tend to do it - piecemeal style, no particular worry about the niceties of assembling a cohesive narrative, plucking memories out of the ether and trying to assemble them like one of those Magnetic Poetry kits. Nothing in life is ever neat, and that goes double for anything to do with love.

To bring things full circle (pardon the pun), that's ultimately what I consider to be my favorite part of "Tangled Up in Blue". I love all the stuff everyone else loves - the coolly understated backing from Deliverance, Dylan's outstanding vocal delivery (his voice rises at just the right moment in every verse), "we always did feel the same/we just saw it from a different point of view" - and yet what stands out the most for me is how a song so neatly delivered, so precise in its verbiage from start to finish, can perfectly evoke something so gloriously, painfully messy. We'll be seeing a lot of more of that on this album, you can be sure...but not done quite as well, or as memorably, as it is here.

EBDS Special Post #5: Radiohead and The Greil Marcus Effect

2011-03-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

Author's note: Well, I *was* planning on my next post being about Tour '74, but something I read caught my fancy, and you're getting this instead. Hopefully this is of some (any) interest.

Just like I'm well aware that all of you that read this blog do not solely listen to the music of Bob Dylan, I'm quite certain that you all know that I, as the proprietor of this humble little blog, also do not solely listen to the music of Bob Dylan. Dylan bows to no one in terms of being my all-time favorite solo artist, but there remains a slot to be filled in the "favorite band" category, and I must confess that it's a two-horse race in that regard, and two boring horses to boot. One of those horses is The Beatles, a favorite band choice so predictable and boring that I'm almost bored just TYPING it, but a choice that I firmly believe stands up to scrutiny simply due to the fact that those guys wrote a hell of a lot of amazing songs. The other would be Radiohead, who I consider the current best band in the world, whose In Rainbows and OK Computer are serious candidates for my favorite album of all time, and whose newest album, The King of Limbs, was released to record stores on this very day (although it was available for about a month prior via digital download, which means that I've listened to the album plenty of times and digested it to the point where I think I can write with some semblance of lucidity about it). And it is them, in part, who I will be writing about in this post.

Now, The King of Limbs is hardly what I would call a bad album. I would say that the first half is definitely not as good as the second half, that there are many quietly beautiful moments but nothing approaching the harmonies of "Paranoid Android" or the end of "Reckoner" when the strings really kick in something fierce, that the Burial/Flying Lotus homages lend the album a strange atmosphere, like we're listening to a totally different band with Thom Yorke at the helm (the cut-up and edited drum patterns, IMO very unlike the normal measured rhythmic genius of Phil Selway, hammer this home), and that "Lotus Flower" and "Codex" both hold rightful places in the Radiohead Pantheon. I would also say that the album represents, at best, something of a lateral move, in that we'd EXPECT them to really be into Four Tet and that the skittering house beats that show up at times don't have the same resonance as the electronic flourishes of Kid A a decade earlier. Again, hardly a bad album, possibly even a very good one, but that's about as far I'd go; more Desire than Blonde on Blonde.

An article I read, oh, about an hour or so ago on the very good music website Stereogum posits that this might be the album which finally puts a dent in the heretofore unshakable critical reputation of Radiohead (which I'd argue has been shaken a few times previous, but whatever). After all, In Rainbows had both the fantastic "pay what you want" story AND gorgeous, guitar-driven (very important, that) music, whereas this album has a weird newspaper being released concurrently with music that, well, is not quite as good as In Rainbows, or at least as immediate in an emotional sense. Judging by reviews on Metacritic, comments on message boards and music sites, and even plain old word of mouth, this might very well be the most divisive album the group's released. And the article above posits that an album like this, one that could be seen as a lateral move at best from a group that's always been considered as forward-thinking as any that's ever existed (which is funny, since their music is so often steeped in what's going on at that time in the music worlds they inhabit and listen to), might be the one where critics finally stop their "well, ain't this great" attitude towards Radiohead, where fans stop blindly accepting their every move as works of genius, and where, just maybe, the emperor might have no clothes.

Does any of this sound a little bit familiar?

If I have any particular issue with the article I've linked to, it would be this - "there's a problem?" And it was with that particular thought, the consideration of what it is that make people stress out so much about what a band chooses to put out (short of a pure gouging of the audience like, I dunno, the artist breathing heavily, any album of new music should generally be considered due diligence on the part of said artist - their fulfilling of both social and record company contracts, as it were) and how it relates to All of Us, that I remembered this. Yes, I am shameless enough to think about articles I've written in the past. But I feel that, in this particular instance, the callback to my own work is warranted. As you may yourself remember, or at least read if you click on the link, I gave Marcus et. al. some stick about what I considered their own selfishness in suggesting that, in any way/shape/form, Dylan belonged to them. That's not to suggest that Dylan's music, in some ways, don't belong to us - after all, he released them into the world, and our collective web of memories and experiences relating to his music gives us at least some license to claim his songs as part of ourselves (what, after all, is this blog if not my version of that?). But the idea that Dylan OWES us anything, or that he needs to keep recording music at all, or (most importantly) that Dylan must continue to define the zeitgeist the way he once had (totally by accident, of course) is painfully naive and absurd - even somebody as admittedly naive as myself knows that.

This, to me, is ultimately the most troubling notion behind the relationship a band has with its fans - the idea that the band, really, owes us anything. Sure, we pay them our hard-earned money, but we always receive something in return - a CD of their music, a ticket to see them perform, a t-shirt, whatever (and, of course, sometimes, we get the music without paying them - although I DID pay $3.00 for In Rainbows on its initial release, so ha!), so we can't really say that we as fans have been done dirt. And as for the music the band chooses to record and release - well, that, of course, is also totally their right and their own prerogative. If they want to record a prog rock opera, or a hyphy album, or their own version of The Basement Tapes, then what exactly is the reason that they should not? Because they recorded The Bends? Please. If you want to call out critics for any perceived complacency in reviewing a band that has delivered for over a decade, you are also within your right. But goodwill is a very powerful thing, and anybody that doubts that need only look at the diminishing returns of Robert De Niro's acting career. We are a forgiving people, so long as the people we're forgiving have already done good by us.

And, inevitably, I find myself thinking of Dylan again, and the position he has occupied for nearly his entire career. Much like Radiohead, who are not so much a band as many separate bands (the one that recorded "High and Dry", the one that recorded "Bloom", the one that recorded "No Surprises", etc., etc.), Bob Dylan is a man that has worn many faces, some of them the faces of incredible music, some of them the faces of horrid music. But we must remember, at the end of the day, that whatever face Radiohead or Bob Dylan chooses to wear is totally at the discretion of Radiohead or Bob Dylan. And if that's not the face you want them to wear...well, it's not a choice you get to make, nor should it be. I'll be there for Radiohead's next album, as expectant as I was for the last, and I will be there for Dylan's next album as well. And if Dylan chooses to release a hyphy album, I imagine we'll all love him just the same. I hope.

EBDS Special Post #6: Tour '74

2011-03-17T09:15:00.001-07:00

The amusing thing about Bob Dylan's Tour '74 is that, because of the simply sprawling range of Dylan's entire career, a small offshoot of said career (if you can call something of Tour '74's magnitude "small" - after all, the tour grossed over $90 million, nearly twelve million people applied for the half million seats available, and it was widely considered the biggest tour in rock's nascent history up to that point) is pretty much forgotten by the public at large while still debated and argued over in the Dylan community to this day. And with good reason - the sound that Dylan and his gang of hoodlums cooked up over the two-month jaunt across America is the kind that makes you feel like you have to choose sides, both in its gutbucket rock electric form and the strum-and-snarl acoustic form Dylan adopted for the tour. And from that sound, and its evolution on stage, comes any number of arguments: "Is Before the Flood any good?" "Did Dylan do his fans a disservice with his shouty acoustic style?" "Did The Band do Dylan's fans a disservice with their shouty rock style?" "Why are the first shows on the tour so much better?" "Does the lack of variety kill the shows?" And so on, and so forth.

As any of you that have read my blog all the way through may or may not know, I have a very special place in my heart for Tour '74, as my interest in the tour dovetailed rather neatly with my exponentially increasing interest with Dylan himself, during my college years when I had enough disposable income and free time on my hands to dive as deep into Bob's extensive unofficial catalog as I cared to. And during that time, having familiarized myself with his more well-known albums and Live 1966 and all the truly essential stuff, I found myself falling more and more in love with Before the Flood and with the bootlegs I was amassing of that 1974 tour. What really grabbed me was what Dylan later complained about when asked about the tour - that raw power they were injecting into the music, any trace of nuance being washed away in a sea of synthesizers, ferocious guitars, and Bob & Co. blaring through every song at full throat (IMO, 74-76 Bob was in his best voice; too bad he overextended himself in 1978 and basically ruined it forever). I even put the more maligned acoustic tunes on repeat, not bothered by how they didn't sound like they did 8 years previous (let alone 10 years previous) and not concerned by the idea that Bob was rushing through them, because the speeding up of tracks usually taken at a measured (and in 1966, soporific) pace gave them a brand new style of their own.

And that, to me, is what Tour '74 was all about - the idea of the brand new applied to Bob's music, in this case a revved-up style that was all about pure energy and possibly not much else. It wasn't like Dylan and The Band didn't know what they were doing or didn't have a plan with where they were taking their music; the thirteen-plus hour rehearsals cranked out in November 1973 kind of speak against that, unless you assume they were like the Get Back rehearsals with all the faffing about that entailed. And while the performances definitely got tighter, more anodyne, and more reliant on the energy that came from being on stage (as well as from other things, of course), the show Dylan played in Chicago is recognizably performed by the same group as the one that recorded Before the Flood in LA, with perhaps a few more bum notes and some more obscure songs thrown in. Dylan and The Band wanted the songs to sound this way, and whether or not you want the songs to sound that way, you have to respect them for making something new out of something old.

And that, in a sense, is the biggest problem most people (including myself, to a certain degree) have with Tour '74 - in the end, Dylan and The Band only seemed interested in making something new out of something old. Only a cursory glance through the tour setlists shows a group increasingly falling back on Bob's mid-60s repertoire, and even more increasingly falling back on Bob's hits, to the point where the only songs Bob performed that he'd written after the crash were "All Along The Watchtower", "Lay Lady Lay", "Knockin' On Heaven's Door", and "Forever Young". All the Planet Waves songs ("Something There Is About You" was abruptly yanked for "Highway 61 Revisited", which isn't too bad because their version of "Highway 61 Revisited" absolutely smokes, but still), any of the rarer tracks ("Hero Blues", "Girl of the North Country", "I Don't Believe You"), and anything the audience might not be extremely familiar with (which wasn't much, if the appreciative reaction to the one-time-only performance of "As I Went Out One Morning" is any indication) was simply chucked over the wayside, in favor of a Greatest Hits performance that smacks of the cynicism that would preclude any number of tours after this that owed a debt to Tour '74 in so many different ways. And that, in a sense, is Dylan's biggest crime on this tour - unsure of himself and of his audience's capacity to embrace him if he didn't just come out and act as a jukebox wearing sunglasses every night, he forsook the adventurous side that had made him so famous to begin with (and which he'd more or less embrace in his older years, as his NET setlists tend to bear out, one too many performances of "Nettie Moore" nonwithstanding).

And that's what makes the legacy of Tour '74 so muddled - that increasing retreat into the protective cocoon of his first musical peak, even as the second peak was just around the corner. Basically everything good and bad about the whole tour - the massive applause line of "It's Alright Ma", proof positive of Dylan's continued relevance and cheap crowd pop all in one; the revelatory rarities like "Fourth Time Around" and "Mama, You Been On My Mind"; the trench-soldiers-going-over-the-top bravado of BTF's version of "Like A Rolling Stone"; and the weary realization that, nope, we never will get to hear this ensemble doing "Going, Going, Gone" or "Tonight I'm Staying Here With You" or even an unusual one like "Queen Jane Approximately" - springs from that fact, that even with all the money banked and the crowds uniformly adoring, Dylan and The Band voluntarily chained themselves to the past in order to not have to deal with their uncertain futures (The Band were past their commercial and creative peak, Dylan you all know about). But that doesn't mean that they didn't make some magic on stage, or that the '74 rendition of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" doesn't have some fire and spark to help offset the original's weary emotion, or that their versions of "Most Likely You Go Your Way" and "Ballad of Hollis Brown" aren't essential (in the latter's case, I'd say more so than the original). Tour '74, for all its backward-looking issues, still has importance musically, and ultimately career-wise as well, as the Dylan that emerged from 1974 was vastly different from the one that entered it. As we shall soon find out.

Bob Dylan Song #172: Wedding Song

2011-02-12T19:57:00.001-08:00

And so we come to the close of Planet Waves with one of the most interesting songs of Dylan's career, a song that puts a lot of its potential meaning directly in the title (why wouldn't you immediately think of Dylan's own marriage upon hearing that title?) and also is imbued with a whole different meaning after Dylan's next album came out ("wow, what the hell happened between then and now?"). On top of that, this is one of the precious few Dylan songs since Bringing It All Back Home that is purely acoustic, and from the sounds of things Dylan recorded it more or less in the same slapdash style as he did his acoustic albums (you can hear Dylan's hand slapping against the guitar, or perhaps the guitar hitting the buttons on his shirt, near the end; Dylan plays the third line of every verse differently, to both the song's benefit and detriment; and there are definitely moments where Dylan seems to be searching for words). It's kind of an odd way to end an album that's been billed as a collaborative effort, and yet a fitting way to end an album that has given so much of its lyrical content to love and devotion and such things. In short, it's kind of what you'd expect from our man Bob - a mass of contradictions that still manages to add up to the image we have of him as a whole.

So what the heck are we, the listening public, to make of this song? There are moments that stray towards legitimately uncomfortable emotional nakedness (that first verse, in particular), or perhaps it just seems that way because we're not used to that sort of thing from Bob; there are also moments as cloaked in poetic mystery as his Electric Trilogy mindbenders (I'm thinking of that "courtyard of the jester" bit). Dylan talks about his children out of nowhere - although he only mentions three, presumably because the extra syllable would've thrown the entire line out of whack - and he also plays at elements of possible discord in his relationship ("we can't regain what went down in the flood" - I've often wondered if this is where the title of Before the Flood came from) that don't quite fit in with the rest of the song's always-and-forever beatitudes. He makes a mention at the end about how he "love(s) you more than ever, now that the past is gone", which can't help but spark any number of theories about what exactly he's getting on about. So, just like most of Bob's songs, then!

To get back to the most obvious point - and, I suppose, the one most people would expect to be talked about in this post - "Wedding Song" has gained an extra and probably unwanted level to its fame because of what came afterwards. I would agree that it seems like something of a disconnect between some of the more over-the-top platitudes Bob's slinging here (who would expect him to sing about ANYBODY "sav(ing) my life" in an unironic manner?) and something along the lines of "oh, I know where I can find you/in somebody's room" (not to mention his improvised bit of business on the Hard Rain version of "Idiot Wind", which is just plain mean-spirited and not even particularly creative), and that "Wedding Song" takes on another plateau of significance because of that disconnect. Hell, maybe it makes sense from the most purely emotional position - I loved you this much, but you were a bitch, so now I hate you this much. QED.

Or maybe we can explore that position a little bit more. The thing about Blood on the Tracks (oh, how long I've studiously avoided trying to discuss that album, only to have to buckle and show some of my cards with just one damn song to go) that makes it a) such a masterpiece and b) a cut above every other breakup album that has ever been recorded is the fact that it shows so many different shades of what it means to be in love and have that love collapse, sometimes even in the same song. "You're A Big Girl Now", which contains the line about adultery (real or accused), also contains one of the most fascinating lines in Dylan's entire catalog, where he sings "I can change, I swear/See what you can do", both revealing naked heartache and desire for reconciliation and taking a bitter semi-mocking jab in practically the same breath. "Idiot Wind", for all its rage and bile, turns the "you're an idiot, babe" of the choruses to "we are idiots, babe" at the very end, Bob ultimately as self-aware as we all know he is. And I argue that an album with that much shading and complexity, one that has so many angles of that most unknowable of the human condition examined to a T, can only come from a love as strong and deep as the one that Bob must have had with his wife. Suze Rotolo (RIP, by the way) got some great songs. Sara Lowndes got a hell of a great album.

It has been said, I'm sure (as in, I'm quite certain somebody said it once, but can't for the life of me remember who) that "Wedding Song" was Dylan's last Hail Mary shot at reconciliation with his wife, a way to try and show her that he still deeply cared for her and their strained marriage was still worth saving. That makes just as much sense as anything else - after all, Dylan REALLY lays it in thick on some of those verses, doesn't he? But I would think that, even if that were true and Dylan simply wrote the song on the way to the studio because he wanted to end his album with a blown kiss of a song to his wife, that viewpoint might diminish the very thing that the theory is trying to prop up - i.e., Dylan's love of his wife, even at the very end of their relationship. I would think that the following album, full of bittersweet emotion, sadness, anger, and even the occasional ray of hope peeking through the black clouds, should tell that story well enough. "Wedding Song" might very well have been a last-gasp declaration of love, but I'd hope that enough time has passed that it can just be seen as a declaration of love.

And that, after far too long of a hiatus in between songs, is the end of Planet Waves! Thank you all for your support and your readership, even with the long arid stretches between content on this site. The next post will be my take on Tour '74, and then we get into what is (in my opinion) the pinnacle of Bob Dylan's career, and a pretty good candidate for the pinnacle of popular music as a whole. Hope you keep reading!

Bob Dylan Song #171: Never Say Goodbye

2011-02-12T19:08:00.000-08:00

Hello again.

So I'm not really sure if I've talked about this at any point during the writing of this blog, but one of the issues that I was going to have with this project was with songs just like this one. As I hope I've ably demonstrated so far, there was never going to be much of a problem with coming up with things to talk about for the major songs - even if it meant that I'd have to trod over some ground that has been trod over (and trod over, and trod over, and trod over...) in order to create a post of any substance, there were still some interesting channels to explore in doing so, and it was always fun to look at some of Bob's classics in ways that perhaps the more entrenched Dylan writers might not. But it's songs like this one - a pleasant sorbet of a track, a palate-cleanser leading in to the epic closer that is "Wedding Song", and a way for The Band to do their thing while Dylan sings a charming but ultimately forgettable song about love that charmingly but ultimately forgettably serves as part of the album's overall aesthetic, Robertson's processed guitar tone and all - in which I find myself truly struggling to come up with something to talk about (so much so that it's taken me six months - well, okay, maybe not). There's an interesting bit about "chang(ing) your last name too" (so it's not about his wife, then?), and a lovely opening verse where Dylan seems to be singing about Minnesota, but there isn't much else to distinguish the song other than its inherently pretty melody.

I imagine I will get at least a few comments taking me to task for my apparent offhand dismissal of the song (a song that, I need to point out, I do like, if not love or anything), and that would not surprise me one bit. After all, I've written my fair share of posts about songs that some Dylan fans, even fans of much greater magnitude than I (I've only been to THREE shows, and the last one a couple years ago - I would guess a fair number of readers here have me beat on that one) could care less about, and I see absolutely nothing with that, either. I do not expect people to have the same reaction to "Mama, You Been On My Mind" as I do. That's what fandom at a level beyond "casual listener" brings you - any true fan's mix CD of Dylan would surely go down roads the typical Columbia-issued Dylan compilations would not, and they will always be the better for it.

Look, I'm not going to pretend that somehow it's the "Black Diamond Bay"s of Dylan's catalog that make him the revered artist that he is today, and not the "Subterranean Homesick Blues"s, any more than I would suggest that the people that compile the Dylan compilations that seem to crop up every couple of years should put on more album tracks and less hit singles. But what I will suggest is that it's one thing for Dylan to be a REVERED artist, a man who wrote "Tangled Up in Blue", for the love of Pete, and another thing for Dylan to be a LOVED artist, a man whose catalog can continually surprise, bewitch, and thrill even his most ardent diehard fans. And I honestly think that it's the lesser-known songs that give Dylan the real heft and substance to his catalog beyond "hey, Famous Songs!", you know? Come for the hits, stay for the numbers like these, so to speak. The mere fact that there are YouTube covers of "Never Say Goodbye" says all you need to know; inasmuch as recording your own version of this track and posting it for mass consumption says you love this song, the existence of those videos shows a commitment and love that is as meaningful as any other way to show how much Dylan's music affects you.

Which, I suppose, comes back to this blog and how I feel about it. You might not think it from the protracted layoff (for which I can only offer sincere apologies), but this humble little project of mine is how I show my own love and commitment to Bob Dylan's music. And just as much as I find myself struggling to write about certain songs (like this one), there are any number of posts in which there are so many things I could write about that song that I find myself having to whittle down the potential topics to something easily readable and not Moby Dick-length. I suppose that explanation is as much apology as it is explanation, but that's just the way that this sort of deal works. I can very easily imagine the alternate universe in which somebody is currently writing an opus the size of my "Mama" post about "Never Say Goodbye", about how a certain era of their life was defined and shaped by that song, and about how it has greatly affected their life the way that "Mama" has affected mine.And if that universe, and that person, and that person's blog actually does exist, I wish them the best of luck. Oh, and I'd tell them to give "Sign on the Window" another spin - that one's a real peach.

Bob Dylan Song #170: You Angel You

2010-08-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to lie - there was a certain amount of temptation to combine this post with "Never Say Goodbye", since both songs are basically the most straightforward love songs on the album (along with "On A Night Like This"), and writing about straightforward love songs is not always the easiest business. This is not to say that I don't think this is a good song; "dummy" lyrics or no, the song has a pleasant MOR sheen to it (especially the opening, with Robertson's oh-so-70's guitar tone soloing next to Hudson's organ stabs) and Dylan puts as much effort into the song as you could reasonably ask for. And hey, this song ended up on Biograph, so it must have stayed with Bob for a while, to the point where he'd make it part of that most definitive (at the time; now kind of outdated) profile of himself up to that point. Had Dylan chosen to pluck any singles from this album (I'd always thought it was strange that he didn't; one would think that "Forever Young" might have both sold well on its own and helped move a few more copies of the album proper), this song would've been a fine, maybe even natural choice.

That, I should note, is not meant to be an insult on my part. Were I the type that would attempt to come up with or espouse offbeat theories about Dylan's music (*cough*), I might suggest the possibility that our man Bob is actually making a parody of the songs that he heard on the radio leading up to this album, his own version of a Todd Rundgren song or something ("if this is love, then gimme more/And more and more and more", et. al.), the sort of lark that Frank Zappa was ever so fond of throughout his entire career. And that might make a bit more sense if the rest of the album was full of that kind of musical wink to the audience, but Bob plays it entirely straightforward throughout, and I have no doubt that he wrote this song in all seriousness (and, one would have to assume, about his wife), and knowing that he's being totally sincere actually helps to improve the song. Dylan is no particular stranger to parody, anyway, and I think if that's what he'd been going for here it would have been a bit more obvious.

Quite frankly, it's the sincerity of this song (and of a great deal of this album) that would have made this work as a radio single; AM/FM radio is not really the domain of subtlety, experimentation, or a lot of the qualities we find in the greatest of music (until it's reached the point where it can be properly/annoyingly deemed "classic" rock - after all, the chords that the Beatles played and Dylan found "outrageous" back in the 60s are essential parts of rock DNA in 2010). Even a band like Radiohead, which most of us would consider a progressive-thinking band, recently scored rock radio success with "Bodysnatchers", by far the most traditionally "rock" and least subtle song on In Rainbows. That isn't the worst thing in the world - in general, unless you have Sirius/XM, you're not LOOKING for subtlety or experimentation on the radio, but something you can bob your head and maybe sing along to in the car or at the office or wherever people listen to the radio these days. It's kind of the same thing with the music played at clubs (which I have had experience with the past year or so, somewhat unfortunately) - nobody goes to clubs to hear real cutting edge shit, but to hear something with a beat that they can dance to. It's the nature of the beast.

"You Angel You", with its well-produced glossiness (there really isn't a way I can say that without making it sound like an insult, but it's a compliment in this case, trust me), simplistic lyrics about love, and a catchy melody (even that "gimme more" middle eight has a way of sticking in your head), certainly fits the bill of "song you could tap your foot to on the radio". And, as much as I might bag on most popular music, there is most certainly a time and a place for music like that. Most of all, it had a place on the album from which it comes, serving both as an example of the general aesthetic of the album (some good friends getting together to play some fun songs) and a palate-cleanser after the acidic bite of "Dirge". That, to me, is what really makes the song worth its existence - Planet Waves, for the most part, is a fun album to listen to, and "You Angel You" helps make it fun.

Bob Dylan Song #169: Dirge

2010-08-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

Easily one of Dylan's bleakest tracks in his entire catalog, "Dirge" is a song that not only seems rather decidedly out of place on Planet Waves, but something that seems out of place in Dylan's 1970s output; really, maybe out of place in his output after the motorcycle crash (up to that point, of course). I'm quite certain I will be corrected if I'm missing something, but just about everything between the Basement Tapes and 1974 had been lighter in tone (certainly Nashville Skyline, and the notoriously "friendly" Self Portrait spring to mind), and one could have been justified in imagining that the Dylan who wrote "Positively 4th Street" and other such rapier-brandishing classics had grown up, properly matured, and had left all that poison-pen business behind. This makes "Dirge" all the more fascinating, mainly because there really hasn't been precedent for a song like this after the crash (and certainly not on Planet Waves up to that point - even "Going Going Gone" has more of a tone of resignation than anything else) and because Dylan has always had a way of channeling invective into something poetic (that line about paying the price of solitude is really fantastic, isn't it?). That's not a bad talent to have.

In cursory searching for theories and meanings behind this song, I've seen people suggest that the song is about drug addiction (the bit about going down suicide road), Joan Baez (which seems rather unlikely, unless Dylan had a burst of nostalgia listening to all those songs he'd written about her in the 60s and decided to crank out another missive just for old time's sake), Dylan renouncing his status as Voice of a Generation (the entire third verse - I'll get to that in a moment), and, of course, his deteriorating relationship with his wife. Given that in a short period of time he would no longer be married, one has to feel that this is the most likely explanation; a trial run for the real bitterness that we'd get one album later. Even without getting into any sort of specifics about what they shared and their children and so on, you can really easily get the vibe that Dylan's singing about his wife, or at least some woman he feels the need to spit this sort of acid at.

The reason that this might not totally be the case is that - well, have you heard the rest of Planet Waves? The general tone of the album itself is much more genial than this song is, I would say the majority of the songs deal more with love than anything else (for example, the song in the next post), and then we have "Wedding Song", the weird sort of yin to this song's yang, a track that trucks in just as much naked emotion as this one but channels it into a song of undying devotion (rather than undying despair and anger). Now, certainly one could suggest that this song is on here precisely for the yin and yang effect, giving what would otherwise be an album of quiet, gentle emotion along the lines of New Morning an added bite it would not otherwise have, and I would be inclined to agree with you. But I don't think that you could make the suggestion that somehow "Dirge" is more in line with Dylan's thoughts at the time than anything else on the album (as one could suggest, given what ultimately happened), as though all the declarations of love and such were just a cover for how Bob was really feeling. That, to me, seems rather too simplistic, and I generally try not to think of Dylan's in simplistic terms.

So what, then, about the idea that this song is really about Dylan giving up his throne? The crux of that particular argument lies in the third verse, where Dylan sings about "songs of freedom and man forever stripped", and concludes that it's "all for a moment's glory, and it's a dirty, rotten shame"; there's also the last verse's bit about singing "your praise of progress and of the Doom Machine", which isn't quite as suggestive, but who knows, right? It's an interesting idea - Dylan couching his disgust with his life as Sixties Idol and his renunciation thereof as some sort of romantic kiss-off sounds a lot like something he would do. However, I don't see that this theory can stand, and there are at least two reasons why. The first is that there are only a few isolated lines that you can really suggest have to do with Dylan and his reputation renunciation; would anybody pick out the "you used to ride a chrome horse" line from "Like A Rolling Stone" and suggest the song is really about Dylan telling his equestrian instructor to piss off? The second, and more poignant reason for me, is that Dylan didn't need to write a song about renouncing the role thrust upon him - his actions since 1966 had more or less done that for him. If Self Portrait hadn't made it clear that he was no longer going to be shackled by his past, what else would? His feelings didn't need to be made over and over again.

So, ultimately, what we have left is another song by Bob that defies easy analysis (even when the analysis seems like it shouldn't be all that hard - seriously, how can this NOT be about Bob and Sara?), made all the more interesting by the time period that Dylan wrote it in. There's still plenty to chew on here, both from the lyrical standpoint (that business about Lower Broadway - maybe Dylan's talking about the place where he got his drugs???) and the recording standpoint (this was the last song cut on the album, recorded fast like Bob usually does things - maybe he was singing about feelings that had just come up?), but in the end it's hard not to feel frustrated if you're trying to look for something deeper in this song. Ultimately, what we have is Dylan at his most pained and emotional, and the song is worth hearing for that alone.

Bob Dylan Songs #167-168: Forever Young

2010-08-21T17:44:00.000-07:00

Author's note: Hopefully nobody will feel too cheated if I combine both the well-known version of "Forever Young" and the up-tempo second version last heard in Pepsi commercials into one post. As for the second version, I'll offer my thoughts in Twitter length: Pretty good version, obvious bone thrown to more rock-oriented folk, can't hold a candle to the original. Next!

So I'm not really sure if this has ever been or currently is a debate, but "Forever Young" is basically the best song on Planet Waves, one of the best songs Dylan's ever recorded (top 10 at least, maybe top 5 depending on whether or not you're actually a parent), and a song so good that you could actually posit that this is Dylan's finest song without getting weird stares (that doesn't mean that it IS, but you wouldn't be lambasted over it, if you know what I mean). Much like how I'd described "Like A Rolling Stone" in my entry for it somewhere around the Ming dynasty, "Forever Young" (the first version - let's not get silly here) is one of those songs that has been burned in our consciousness in a way where it's impossible to imagine it in any other form - Bob surely didn't have this whole song pop out of his brain fully formed, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had, y'know? Everything about the released master take, from Robertson's gentle solos to the harmonica stabs throughout and to Dylan's incredible vocal performance, maybe the greatest of his career ("Something There Is About You" is a personal favorite, but I will fully admit that this performance here blows it out of the water), is so inch-perfect that every time I listen to the track it takes all my, erm, inherent manliness to not just weep at how amazing the track is.

There is a story on the Wikipedia page for Planet Waves about how this song was going to be left off the album because one of Dylan's childhood friends had brought a girl in the studio and she'd goofed on him about become a big old softie in his old age (the ripe old age of 32, but I digress), so Dylan decided that he didn't want the song to be heard. Now, I'm pretty glad I don't live in the parallel universe where Bob hadn't eventually listened to the voice of reason and stuck this song on the album after all, but suffice to say that if Bob had thrown the song into the vaults, not only would this instantly become the greatest song Bob never officially released (snatching the crown away from "Blind Willie McTell"), but - and I'm not sure how else to say this - I think I would actually have liked Bob less if he hadn't recorded the song. I mean, this is purely hypothetical of course, but let's think about this. I think we're all okay with Bob having consigned "Farewell, Angelina" and "Series of Dreams" and, yes, "Mama, You Been On My Mind" to the vaults - they are all great songs, sure, but Bob has surely built up enough goodwill to let those omissions slide. But a song like "Forever Young"? If any other person recorded that song, could they ever possibly say "meh, not my A game" and toss the song aside? How could you ever possibly live with yourself? It would have been the greatest mistake of Bob's career (and he's had a few); that, I think, says a lot about this song.

Okay, so. I think it would be safe to say that, like anywhere between 99-100% of Bob's songs, the reason that people love this one so much is because the lyrics are so incredible, as beautiful and heart-wrenching a summation of the parenting experience as you could ever hope to find. And I think that we can also agree that, in terms of just simple and direct songwriting, this might be as simple and direct as Bob ever got in his entire career outside of Nashville Skyline (John Wesley Harding is pared-down, but occasionally veered on the cryptic side; perhaps you could argue for "Wiggle Wiggle", but that's an argument I urge you not to make). In fact, the main argument a person could make against this song, if they so chose/were lacking human emotion, would be to point out that the lyrics occasionally veer towards a mawkish bent, the sort that might turn off a listener. There might be a point there - after all, "may you always be courageous, stand upright and be strong" is a little too simple and direct, y'know? Most Dylan fans have always thought of the man as a poet; it can be a bit uncomfortable when said poet starts writing numbers a little too close to something out of his diary. Getting soft in his old age, right?

Now, you could certainly pen any number of responses full of spluttering outrage to that bit of drivel, but my own personal response would be rather more measured, as well as my own personal feelings as to why I think the song is a) so amazing and b) has the staying power that it does (apologies in advance if this seems too obvious, but sometimes obvious things need to be written about). Personally, what I think makes "Forever Young" the song that it is is the fact that the lyrics ARE so simple and direct. As previously mentioned in my award-winning post for "Mama, You Been On My Mind"*, a great deal of art has been created in order for us as human beings to allow us to properly understand the Great Issues of Life that we otherwise have trouble understanding, stuff like love and death and infinity and all that fooferaw. Now, that's not to say that the issues themselves can't be simple, of course - it's that there's so much stuff that gets in between the cracks and gums up the works of those issues that we have trouble wrapping our heads around. And I would say that the process of caring for children and watching them grow qualifies on both counts - we understand all this on a gut level, but when you introduce stuff like, say, the entire world into the mix, things can become a bit complicated.

*note: this post did not win any awards

And, thus, we get "Forever Young", a song that so brilliantly and neatly takes something incredibly massive and unwieldy and makes it something simple and direct, a song that both engages our brain and our heart in equally powerful ways. Would this song have possibly been improved with the dense allusions and wordplay of 60s Bob, or even BOTT Bob? I can't imagine that possibly could be true. A parent might not be able to think of his experiences with his children in a complex song-story or even through the filter of something like "Something There Is About You" - but a parent will surely understand and identify with a line like "may your heart always be joyful, may your song always be sung/and may you stay forever young". And that is how we understand who, and what, we are.

Bob Dylan Song #166: Something There Is About You

2010-08-21T07:19:00.001-07:00

On an album that features the debut of my favorite period for Bob Dylan's singing voice, this song stands as a personal favorite in terms of just hearing Bob sing. I'm not the sort of person that feels any particular need to make excuses for Bob's singing style, even his present day voice (which, like it or not, is a voice that a person not already part of the Dylan club is probably going to have trouble with) - his reputation lies mainly on his songwriting, he was "blessed" with a gritty voice that could hit the notes but not too much else, and he made the very best of it for a very long time (until about 1977, when he blew it out trying to overexert himself for the ill-advised 1978 world tour - but hey, at least we got Live at the Budokan out of it, right? Right?), which is about all you can ask for. But when Dylan decides he's up for a vocal performance, he can deliver - the quintessential example being the Montreal '75 performance of "Isis", where he turns up the vocals to 11 in order to match the RTR's dramatic performance. And this song is another example, at least for me, as Bob hits all the right notes, adds some nice flourishes at the end of every verse, and sounds like he's giving the metaphorical 110% all throughout. The Band gives a sympathetic backing, and the result is another strong tune.

Listening to this song, one could very easily marvel at just how well Dylan crafts even the most straightforward of love songs (how many people would think to describe a ghost as "something that used to be/something that's crossed over from another century?"), pulling out brilliant turns of phrase like "the phantoms of my youth" and wrapping it around a simple yet earworm-ready melody. One could, I imagine, also marvel (and chuckle) at how Bob devotes half a verse to telling the object of his desire "hey, I COULD say I won't sleep around, but that's a bit much" (yes, he says it a bit more eloquently, but I think I got the gist of what he was shooting for), both a sign of his humanity and of his wry, puckish humor. Whenever I listen to this song, though, I now think about that great second verse, the one with "phantoms of my youth" in it, and the one where, right out of nowhere, he starts singing about his childhood in Minnesota, a glimpse into his past that we very, very rarely ever got out of him (I forget if Danny Lopez is a real person, and I can only hope one of you intrepid readers will remind me, as my copy of Behind the Shades has long since gone AWOL). Considering that there were probably still people back then that thought Bob grew up in New York City (so easily identifiable is he with both the city and the state), it must have been a shock to hear Bob going on about how this woman has reminded him of a past that, apparently, he just can't seem to shake.

So much of our collective cultural work has dealt with the notion of running away from your past and from where you came from, whether it's because you had a terrible childhood or because you're a rich kid who wanted to make something of yourself or whatever, and yet for the most part Bob has resisted bringing that into his own work. It's probably because he got his fill of it telling all those tall tales in his early years, or just as likely because his actual upbringing was really not all that particularly bad, or (this is probably it) because it would run counter to his ever-present mystique - either way, Bob has generally left those autobiographical elements out of his songwriting. Of course, the other autobiographical elements - i.e. his love life - have been present more or less since day dot, but that sort of thing tends to fuel your songwriting if you've already got the talent for songwriting. That's not always the case with your upbringing (unless you're Springsteen or somebody); often the past is meant to be just that.

And that's what makes that sudden, odd little peek into Dylan's past life all the more interesting and exciting. So deep is Dylan into his "I'm making (x) up to you, Sara" period (the apotheosis being "Wedding Song") that he forgets himself for a moment here, allowing a peek at young Robert Zimmerman hiding behind the Bob Dylan mask. And who knows, maybe Bob had it in mind all along to throw that in there, sort of a reminder to everybody of where he came from and what it meant to have those memories come rushing back, and what kind of woman it would have to be to dig through the layers of past history and Greenwich Village nights and concerts in Dublin with The Hawks and hanging out with Johnny Cash to reach the former Elston Gunn underneath it all. I like to think that Bob just had his guard down, just for that moment, and we got to see something we very rarely see. It's moments like that that can make a fan, well, a fan.

Bob Dylan Song #165: Hazel

2010-08-21T05:56:00.000-07:00

Given that most of this post will be dedicated to The Last Waltz (don't worry, there will be some Dylan-related content), I might as well get my feelings about "Hazel" out of the way here. I like the song just fine (even though Dylan spends the middle eight groping around for the proper vocal key), and I think of it as a fine piece of the album's overall aesthetic, but it's not particularly a song that I would hold up as a classic or anything. To be honest, It makes me think more of the kind of song Dylan might have heard on WABC or something in the '70s and decided "hey, I'm gonna give that a shot"; couldn't you just imagine this song sandwiched between "Same Old Song and Dance" and "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" during some imaginary DJ's 7-11 shift as he blathers on about how you can get tickets at your local YMCA for the Neil Young show? Even the lyrics kind of leave something to be desired ("ooh, just a touch of your love", indeed), which is a slight disappointment considering how accomplished the songwriting on this album is otherwise. Maybe I'm making too much of this song - I can't imagine Dylan and the Band imagined this song to be much more than a trifle anyway - so I'll just move on.

Now, then. The Last Waltz is interesting for any number of reasons, a few of which I'll list here - Scorcese directing at the height of his drug addictions (but not at the height of his fame - his reputation at the time basically rested on Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, which are two incredible pillars to rest a reputation on, but still); trying to figure out which of the musicians on stage was the most coked-up (one would imagine Neil Young takes that prize, although sadly you never do see that massive chunk of cocaine stuck in his nostril); seeing Neil Diamond back when he had any cultural relevance; and, yes, Dylan's last collaboration with The Band, with two Planet Waves songs (including this one, a song choice I will go to my grave not understanding) and two songs from the legendary 1966 tour serving as the mini-setlist. That The Last Waltz is a movie that has to be seen is not much in doubt (Allen Toussaint's horn arrangements take the songs to a whole other level, and it's SCORCESE directing, for God's sake); what The Last Waltz actually means is something else entirely.

I imagine that if you polled any number of casual music fans, even fans of rock music, about what the first thing is that they would think of when they think of The Band, The Last Waltz would surely top the list (either that, "The Weight", or Music From Big Pink, I'd guess). And that's not without good reason, obviously - given its status as The Band's (supposed) retirement, the heavy hitters that guest starred, the man who directed the documentary, and the time period that it was made (the mid-70s, with the excesses of rock at their apex before punk music came along to change a thing or two - I'd say "change everything" but that is simply not true), it's probably the most obvious choice. But here's the thing - The Last Waltz is not only way more famous than The Band itself actually is (if that makes sense), it also makes The Band seem like a more popular band than they ever had been during their career. After all, this is a band with one platinum album, two gold albums, and one Top 5 and one Top 10 album - a great haul by most measures of the imagination, but certainly not what you'd expect for a band deserving of that lovingly crafted a documentary, right? Even their #1 album was a collaboration with a more famous artist, and by their 3rd album they'd pretty much peaked as a popular force. And yet The Band is still fondly remembered by many, and probably as a bigger band then they ever were at their peak. That has to be because of The Last Waltz, right?

Perception, especially perception after the fact, has always been a funny thing. Think of The Sex Pistols, a group as cobbled together as any number of boy bands, yet held by many even today as the pinnacle of what punk music is/was supposed to mean. Or think of Sylvia Plath, whose most well-known work was published after her death and who never lived to reap the rewards of The Bell Jar, yet who has a critical reputation that far outstrips her sales or the regard she had during her lifetime (kinda like The Band, actually). We never know what it is that will change our legacy, let alone the legacy of famous artists; sometimes only one thing can completely change a legacy, either for the better or worse. It is the great artists, ultimately, that can resist that sort of legacy-shifter, those that have built a body of work so great and massive that ultimately nothing short of something truly awful can change the public's perception. After all, not too long ago the same Mr. Scorcese filmed a documentary about the first part of Bob Dylan's career (with a lucid and thoughtful Bob providing an interview - wonder how many directors he'd have done THAT for?), a documentary that surely would have done for most artists what The Last Waltz has done for The Band, and yet it serves mainly as an interesting adjunct to Bob's career, a long and interesting way to tell us something we most likely already knew. That, to me, is the mark of Dylan's staying power - his work is so strong it even resists boosts to its credibility.

Bob Dylan Song #164: Tough Mama

2010-08-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

If choosing a song that's most emblematic of the style of Planet Waves, I think I would go with "Tough Mama". Everything that you can find throughout the rest of the album is here - the Band's rough-and-tumble playing style (the guitar, in particular, comes flying at you - it sounds like something out of a Jim Croce track, which might very well have been the point); Dylan's raw, more raunchy singing voice; somewhat cryptic lyrics in the vein of his 60s work (without actually sounding like his 60s work - a pretty neat trick, that); and, ostensibly, lyrics about Sara Lowndes. The sum result of that, as you would probably expect, is a pretty damn fantastic song, certainly one that I find myself returning to whenever I pull this album out for a test run. In fact, back in the days when I was obsessively collecting Dylan bootlegs, I would often single out shows that had this song on it (more on that in a moment). I can't really tell you why this song has stuck with me for so long; then again, I'd have difficulty saying that about most of my favorite songs.

What I've always enjoyed about the lyrics of this song is that, to me at least, they serve as a pure example of Dylan's artistic progress during his third peak as a songwriter, a synthesis of his dizzying ability to harness the English language and his equally dizzying ability to mine the unconsciousness of our American psyche and draw from it to make art. For me, the closest analogue to this song is "Isis", which tells more of a story than the wandering verses of "Tough Mama", but employs the same mythical, dreamlike imagery (compare "Jack the Cowboy went up north" to "she was there in the meadow where the creek used to rise") to give the song a character different from much of what Dylan had written before. If you want to take things to more of an extreme, one might suggest that "Tough Mama" is the prologue to the epic that is "Isis", where the narrator offers a golden ring and states that it's his duty to take her to "the field where the flowers bloom" - that sounds like a meadow to me. Every time I hear this song I think about the heady rush that love brings, and every time I think of "Isis" I think about the extreme lengths one will go to in order to keep that love (or, in some cases, to save failing love). It's not often that one can link songs like that in any artist's catalog, but whenever you can it certainly enriches the listening experience.

Of course, the stuff of myth is one thing, but Dylan's real life was already beginning to intrude on his songwriting, and it's pretty tempting to read into a song like this and attempt to pick out elements that have to do with what was going on with Bob at this time in his life. Is he the Lone Wolf that "went out drinking - but that was over pretty fast"? (After all, once Bob hit the road again after his divorce, especially during both RTRs, the drinking would return with a vengeance.) What exactly does Dylan mean when he says he "stood alone upon the ridge, and all [he] did was watch"? Is he singing about himself when he says "I gained some recognition, but I lost my appetite" (surely a reference to his wilderness years)? Maybe that's why people like Planet Waves as much as they do - Dylan fans always seem to be hankering to get some songs we could go over with a fine tooth comb again, another round of music's greatest parlor game (name me three other artists that have written - or theoretically written - as much about themselves in their music as Bob has). For many of us, THAT is what enriches the listening experience, and I certainly would not begrudge anybody that.

I mentioned earlier about how I collected bootlegs that featured this song for a while (which was a good thing for my listening experience, as not only does it appear on much of the earlier - and superior - '74 setlists, but also on many of his '98 shows, which I've always felt was one of his best touring years); it's not a song that's so rare that you'd want to break your back looking for it (like, say, "Romance in Durango" in its one lone non-RTR appearance), but it's just rare enough that having the song appear on the setlist lends a show a cache that "All Along The Watchtower" simply does not anymore. On top of that, there's something that I just sort of enjoy about Dylan breaking that song out, one that presumably the majority of his listening audience has no particular regard for. However, I have wondered why it is that Dylan gives this song its occasional workout, far more so than any other song on here except for "Forever Young" (then again, I'm more curious why Dylan doesn't play more songs off here anyway - how many major artists virtually ignore one of their #1 albums on stage???). It's a good song, sure, but is it really that much better than "Going Going Gone" or "Something There Is About You"?

I wrote about the nature of Dylan playing and not playing his songs on stage in my "Temporary Like Achilles" post, and this song serves as an antithesis to my theory about "Temporary", even though the aesthetic created by Planet Waves is arguably just as strong as the one on Blonde on Blonde. The thing about Blonde on Blonde is that it's such a special case, at least in my opinion, because it so recognizably has its aesthetic, because the album as a whole has settled into myth and legend the way few, if any of his other albums have (certainly none of his other 60s albums, maybe Blood on the Tracks, definitely Under the Red Sky - just wanted to see if you were paying attention), and it makes it harder to draw out the lesser-known songs the same way you can draw out the classics from there. Planet Waves doesn't really have that problem, and so it's probably not that big a deal for Bob to trot out this song or "Hazel" every once in a while. And I, personally, am thankful that he does.

Bob Dylan Song #163: Going Going Gone

2010-06-13T16:49:00.000-07:00

This has always been one of my favorite Dylan songs; I won't even bother using the "sneaky favorite" appellation that I've used elsewhere on this blog. To me, it contains one of the best arrangements on the entire Planet Waves album (that weirdly stuttering Robertson guitar riff that kicks the song off will always be burned in my memory), as well as some of the best lyrics - a bitter Dylan is quite often the optimal Dylan (as we will see not too far from now, of course). Sure, the words to the song may seem slight by comparison to something like "Something There Is About You", but that's what gives it that extra dramatic edge, in my opinion. Even the middle eight, the "Grandma said" part that might seem at first to be at odds with the rest of the track, adds an extra dimension to the darker, angrier verses, a ray of sunshine poking through the clouds. There's a reason the song pops up all throughout the second leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue - it's a song about leaving love behind, and Dylan in 1976 was all about leaving love behind, in the nastiest and most self-destructive form possible.

It's a testament to the somewhat schizophrenic nature of this album that Dylan chose to place this song, so full of barely contained rage and bile and hurt (it peeks out whenever he draws out words like "whaaaaaaaaat happens next", but is otherwise very tightly contained), right after the freewheelin' good time jamboree of "On A Night Like This", immediately to be followed by the equally fun good time jamboree that is "Tough Mama". Sequencing is always a tricky business to begin with, but it's kind of interesting to have those two bouncy, jaunty rockers sandwiching one of Dylan's weariest and bitterest songs. As I wrote in the last post, this is an album of emotions, and one thing emotions tend to not be is particularly consistent. I kind of like that Bob's willing to veer from one emotional pole to the next in the span of three songs.

The always informative, ever-helpful Dylanchords website has compiled a selection of altered lyrics to this song from live performances on the two tours it appeared on (and why it appeared in the Budokan tour setlists is anybody's guess - with RTR II it makes a lot more sense), and you can see just how much of a vehicle for Bob's anger this song became whenever he performed it in front of a live audience. There's the Fort Worth 1976 version, with the sly dig at Joan Baez and the rather enlightening change of "don't you and your one true love ever part" to "don't you and your life-long dream ever part", a wry re-statement of Bob's priorities at that particular time (one imagines that Bob would rather cut off a pinkie finger than stop being a musician, which I would assume is more or less his own life-long dream). There's the Budokan version, which transforms the lyrics into a conversation in which the narrator beseeches some anonymous woman to not "get too close/to make me change my mind", which speaks to all sorts of issues that I'm not accredited enough to properly delve into. And then there's the July 4th Paris version, which moves said conversation into the context of an adulterous relationship ("I'm gonna go back to your woman/You can go back to your man"). It's almost astonishing just how much Bob reveals in these lyrics without having explicitly revealed anything - the sleight of hand he's been a master at performing, writ large.

And, it should be said, a sleight of hand that works to the song's detriment. For me, at least, what gives the song its emotional power are both its coiled-spring arrangement, all pent-up energy and restraint that only really gains release during the middle eight, and the extremely direct lyrics, as spare and stripped-down as anything on John Wesley Harding. One great side of Dylan's songwriting - in fact, one of the few things that has stuck with him throughout his entire career - is his ability to utilize the idea of "less is more", from the simple tale of woe in "Don't Think Twice" to the weary grit of "Love Sick", and "Going Going Gone" is one of his masterpieces of that formula. It almost does the song a disservice to decide "well, maybe more is more", and to take that framework and try to jam into it what could already be read between the lines. It's quite understandable, of course - the Dylan of 1976-1978 was not in what you would particularly call an optimal mental place - but it's still rather jarring nonetheless to have Bob so cavalierly sing about being treated like a clown and feeling so dissatisfied. Perhaps that's just me.

There will be plenty of time down the line to try and get more in-depth into what was going on with Dylan during that period of his life, arguably one of the most crucial in his entire career (he entered 1976 as one of the biggest musicians in the world - from a commercial standpoint, no less - and exited 1978 having made a decision that would stun just about everybody who heard it); suffice it to say that if Dylan ever really had what recovering addicts call a "bottom", it very well could have been during that time. "Going Going Gone", written a few years before that period, is a definite foreshadowing of that frame of mind, as indeed are a few other songs on Planet Waves. But what sets the album version of this song apart is that it's Dylan's emotions tightly reined in by his amazing songwriting instincts, allowing us the tiniest glimpse into his psyche without laying it bare. The live versions of this song are Dylan's id running amok, the musical equivalent of walking down the street wearing a trenchcoat and opening it to random passersby. That's an ugly image, to be sure - but Bob was in an ugly frame of mind.

Bob Dylan Song #162: On A Night Like This

2010-03-03T13:06:00.000-08:00

Author's note: Obvious apologies for a lack of updates. If nothing else, I've learned that I probably have no place in a courtroom in a speaking/debating capacity. But I probably already knew that.

(1)

If you go back and take a look at the first ever #1 albums for the big-time artists of the 1960s - hell, maybe even the big-time artists of musical history - you are going to find a hell of a lot of really, really famous albums. Meet the Beatles!, Kid A, Electric Ladyland, Led Zeppelin II - we're often talking about records that just about any serious fan of music has heard of, and most casual fans of music have heard of as well. This isn't to say that Billboard chart positions are going to tie into what makes a great album, of course; I would certainly hope that I've made my feelings about that known at some point on this here blog. But what I'd like to think I'm getting at here is that, for the upper echelon of musicians and bands that have made any sort of impact on our musical experience, their first album to reach the toppermost of the poppermost is going to be pretty darn well known.

Which, as you might expect, brings me to Planet Waves. Now, we all know that Dylan has never been and probably never will be the kind of artist that you tend to associate with commercial success. His run in the 1960s, with the benefit of hindsight (WTBOH for short), seemed like a by-product of the times (not that the music isn't absolutely extraordinary, but c'mon - people were talking about how strange "Like A Rolling Stone" sounded being played on WABC BACK THEN), his run in the 1970s (WTBOH) seemed like a weird by-product of the whole nostalgia kick that made Tour '74 such an astonishing box office hit, and his current run of top-selling albums is almost certainly a by-product of his large and long-lasting fanbase simply sweeping him to the top of the charts (one also wonders if his current core audience is the type that tends to keep buying albums in the stores anyway, but that's a discussion for another day). And it seems kind of fitting, then, that the first time Dylan ever brought home a #1 album was both part of that 70s nostalgia (as befitting an album collaborated with The Band, who had surely peaked as a commercial outfit by then but still had that 1966 cache) and an album that has more or less receded into history, even for Dylan fans. It didn't help that Planet Waves basically sank like a stone upon release, selling one-sixth of its total for 1974 after advance sales. For most people, it's something of an afterthought, Dylan testing his brakes before taking off with the mid-70s double shot that reestablished him as an Artist of Note.

I personally find this to be unfair. While I'd probably agree that it's the lesser of the Seventies Trilogy, much like the lesser of the Sixties Trilogy (Bringing It All Back Home), Planet Waves manages to both be a bridge to creative nirvana and a pretty damn good album in its own right, a collection of songs that manages to stand on its own merits. "Forever Young", of course, is probably everybody's favorite here (and rightly so), but any number of tracks stand up with what Dylan did with the rest of his decade - "Something There Is About You", "Going, Going, Gone", and the astoundingly underrated "Tough Mama", one of Dylan's best pure rock songs. In fact, what makes Planet Waves such an anomaly to me is that it's one of the few albums where Dylan's just concentrating on making a straight-up rock album, one that has songs that were MEANT to be played on WABC. I'm sure a lot of that had to do with The Band - and who knows, the realization that he was pumping out quality songs again probably got Bob all fired up to crank out some jams, relatively speaking.

If there IS one way that this album could be seen as a test run for anything, it's (oddly enough) the combination of naked emotional outpouring and carefully concealed storytelling that makes Blood on the Tracks the incredible masterpiece that it is (what, did you think I was going to say it's because of the arrangements?). Dylan hadn't quite reached the same virtuoso level at this point (it would come through his therapy sessions and, yes, from the divorce), but his slow but sure re-acquaintance with his muse (and, yes, his failing marriage) had obviously given him a boost that he had been lacking from the recording of Nashville Skyline up to that point. And there's a great deal of emotion to be found here - "Dirge", obviously, but there's also the slightly mawkish yet remarkably real sentiment of "Wedding Song", the bitterness behind "Going, Going, Gone", and (of course) "Forever Young", a song so good I wish I was Bob's kid simply so that I could say it was written about me. Dylan, by tapping into what made him tick and what was important to him, had gotten back into his groove, and it was only upwards from there.

(2)

"On A Night Like This", the opener for Planet Waves, tends to remind me about "To Be Alone With You", a song that I consider to be the actual opener for Nashville Skyline (as the songs that precede it are a lark of an instrumental and a duet with Johnny Cash on a cover of Bob's own tune). For one thing, it's a joy to listen to musically, The Band getting to work whipping up their own brand of good time jamboree fun (in fact, the arrangement gets a little TOO busy at times, but that's part of the fun) and Bob blasting out harmonica at the end with as much abandon as he's ever put into a harmonica solo. If nothing else, you get the feeling right off the bat that this is going to be a different kind of Dylan album, and that we're getting ready for something different yet again. Also, much like "To Be Alone With You", Bob weaves together an enthusiastic ode to spending some quality solo time with the missus in his life, sounding almost giddy in his picture painting of the evening that lies ahead. As something of a trailer for what's to come on the album, both songs work remarkably well.

And, one imagines, a critic of this album could simply dismiss this song as "slight", the same way that people have derided "To Be Alone With You" (and, it should be said, the album that song happens to be on as well) as slight. One can surely see the rationale behind that - after all, there's nothing too particularly exciting about a song that describes two people in a cabin in the woods on a snowy night, getting to know each other better (both in the intellectual and, presumably, the Biblical senses), and we've come to expect so much more from our man Bob, haven't we? This is, after all, the man that wrote all those songs with all those crazy lyrics, the man who expanded the vocabulary that rock songs could actually use, and we're getting stuff like "hold on to me, pretty miss/say you'll never go astray", and so on. And even if you discount the classics Bob had written before, listening to this song might give the impression that Bob banged this sucker out in about 30 minutes, scribbling down some words while waiting for The Band to show up at the studio. We expect better, no?

And, much like the reason I like Nashville Skyline the way that I do, I find myself just shaking my head at the rhetorical argument I just dreamed up one paragraph ago and may not actually exist (though I would bet it has been advanced once or twice). Perhaps it doesn't scan quite as well when you're listening to the album for the very first time, the reason "On A Night Like This" succeeds, both on its own and in the context of Planet Waves, is because it gives us one particular aspect of what it means to be in love, and puts it in exactly the kind of musical spirit that one might reasonably expect. After all, who amongst us (especially the married readers of this blog, I would suggest) hasn't been excited about a night alone with their significant other, away from the kids and from bills and from doing the dishes and laundry and all the other crap that comes with life in these here United States, just you two and a pot of coffee and a crackling fire in the fireplace to keep you company? And if you WERE to write a song, as Bob has, about that kind of experience, wouldn't you want it to be full of unencumbered, simplistic joy, both in the lyrics and in the spirited band (excuse me, Band) accompaniment? I think I would.

In the context of the album, as well, "On A Night Like This" serves a purpose - just one side of the die we call love (poetic, isn't it?). With the vicious tongue-lashing of "Dirge", the marvel and wonder of "Something There Is About You", and the almost overwhelming devotion of "Wedding Song", Dylan gives us many different sides to what it means to be committed emotionally to another human being (even more so than Blood on the Tracks, which trucks in a more resigned form of showing us what love is all about), and "On A Night Like This" captures the more joyful, spontaneous side of that emotion. Not only that, but it's a hell of a lot of fun to listen to as well, which probably explains why it got the honor of pole position on what was considered to be Bob's first real "comeback" album of his career. It may not be "Love Minus Zero/No Limit", but it doesn't have to be, and that's a good thing indeed.

Bob Dylan Song #161: Knockin' On Heaven's Door

2010-02-25T08:19:00.000-08:00

It still kind of amazes me, nearly forty years after this song's release, just how damned literal the lyrics to this song are; that this song became a considerable hit for numerous artists amazes me even further. If you listen to the song in the context of the film the lyrics work perfectly well - the Slim Pickens character, who just got plugged during a shootout on the hunt for Billy the Kid, is having a tearful final moment with his wife, and Bob singing about "mama, take this badge off of me/I can't use it anymore" fits seamlessly with the scene. (This link goes into a little greater depth about the song used within the film.) Taking the song out of context, however, the whole thing just seems...I dunno, maybe a bit much for a nominal pop single? After all, this song ended up on AM radio and was covered God knows how many times, and it's basically a man talking about burying his guns as he slips away into death to meet his Maker. Throw in the whole gospel-like harmonies and we're talking about one damn depressing song at its face.

Perhaps, then, what gives this song its everlasting fame (you could also argue this for "All Along The Watchtower", although that song's lyrics are as cryptic as this one's is direct) is its brilliantly simple chord arrangement, G and D (two of the most basic chords you can play on the guitar) with A minor 7 and C switching off from line to line. It's the sort of thing a beginner might strum while rooting for his first ever tune - Lord knows I've come up with the same simple arrangements in the past, like The Ramones with much less inclination to play punk or, you know, talent - and yet it completely and totally works, because it completely and totally sets a mood. Even if you stripped away the gentle band arrangement and the harmonies, those chords work on such a brutally elemental level that you can't help but just be utterly swept away by them. It's always a rare Dylan song where Dylan's musical sense stands toe to toe with his lyrical sense, but we have an example of that here; Dylan's powerful, simple phrases (and that chorus!) matched beautifully with those almost inevitable chords.

In a previous post during the Self Portrait run, I'd written about how Marcus had envisioned Bob writing the soundtrack to a Western or some such thing with that godforsaken album, and how he didn't really succeed (you know, due the album not being good and all). Not only is there something kind of amusing about the fact that Bob eventually did get his mug into a Western after all (which surely must have appealed to him on any number of levels), but he also managed to write the perfect Western song, one that could have been easily slotted into any number of the revisionist Westerns that, ironically, Sam Peckinpaugh ushered in with The Wild Bunch and Clint Eastwood apotheosized with Unforgiven. Every one of those damned movies has a scene where one of the heroes dies in heroic fashion after heroically getting himself shot in heroic battle, and every single one of those scenes would've been vastly improved by Bob's sonorous voice intoning about that long black cloud coming down. Of all of Bob's achievements in his career, I bet if you pointed this out to him, this would be one he'd really be proud of.

So there are two versions of this song I'd like to say a few words about. The first, which I'm sure some of you have heard, is the Guns 'n Roses version, one of their last singles and a tack-on to Use Your Illusion II. Now, I assume most of you can guess in advance what I'll say about it, and I'll temper that by noting that I actually like their version of "Live and Let Die"; in some ways, it actively improves upon the original (most notably in the fact that the reggae bit is much, MUCH less awkward). Where their version of that song and this kind of split apart, though, is that while "Live and Let Die" has an inherent silliness to it (forget that it's a Bond theme, which carries its own goofy pomposity; have you ever LISTENED to "Live and Let Die"? There's a reason Wings gets its share of mockery, you know) that Guns 'n Roses both sort of went along with (because anthem-era Guns 'n Roses has its own inherent silliness) and punctured with the POWER OF ROCK, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"'s pretentious bent is tempered by the fact that it's a really, tremendously good song. And GnR's version, with it's ill-considered musical breakdown at the end, guitars turned all the way up to 11, and Axl Rose doing every single Axl Rose thing that annoys the hell out of everybody that isn't a slavish devotee, manages to suck every single bit of what makes "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" special out of the tune. That actually deserves kudos, in a way.

The second version (which is jumping the gun a bit) is the Tour '74 version, where Dylan and the Band incorporate this most solemn of anthems into the "Bob Dylan Good Time Jamboree" aesthetic that Before the Flood so badly represents. Given the numerous excesses of this particular tour - I'm listening to this version now, and if there was any way to cut the goddamn Garth Hudson synthesizers out, I would have already done it - the version we got on the official album is relatively understated, featuring one of Bob's best vocals on said album (I always love how he sings "ground" and "shoot") and rather glorious backing vocals from Manuel et al. And, with the obvious exception of Robertson spraying mini-solos around with his typical bonhomie, the guitars are scaled back pretty well, far more so than for something like "Lay Lady Lay" on the same tour. In short, the Band does the song fair justice, and on a tour marked for performances that one wishes involved some restraint in the right places, we get a pretty good glimpse of how good the tour could be when that restraint was properly used.

Bob Dylan Song #160: George Jackson

2010-02-21T10:15:00.000-08:00

And, without the slightest bit of warning, Bob Dylan had returned to the forum of protest songs. Cut just over two months after the death of the Soledad Brother in a prison shootout (and released a mere week after the song's recording, a rather amazing turnaround if you stop to think about it), one of the few songs from Dylan's first period in the wilderness was a throwback to his acoustic days, as though the stern young man of the Times cover had inhabited his body for a couple of weeks until he could get the song cranked out before heading back to from whence he came. There happens to be two versions of the song - a mellow full-band version with the guys he'd recorded his Greatest Hits Vol. II songs with, and a solo acoustic version, just Bob and his harmonica, like the good ol' days. It is the solo acoustic version that I'm linking to, simply because it makes the most sense; until "Hurricane", after all, that was just Bob's metier.

I feel such a weird sense of unreality when I hear "George Jackson" - not because it's a bad song or because it's too weird or anything like that, but more because it doesn't really feel like it should exist, if that makes sense. I'm not saying that the life of a family man would automatically erase the part of Bob's mind that cared about humanity (any more than I would say that his crazy years as a rock star would do so); it's just that...I mean, of all the times, after all that had happened, that the killing of a Black Panther in prison would be the tipping point for Bob to finally pick back up his "outrage" pen seems a bit odd. And I'm not downplaying the historical significance of George Jackson at all (my brother was rather deeply moved by Soledad Brother, and it's a fair guess that he was not the only one), just feeling a bit bemused about the whole thing. After all, when MLK and Robert Kennedy were gunned down, Bob was baking bread and teaching his children the ABCs or what have you. It's just funny how these things work, I guess.

As for the actual song itself...I mean, there's not really much I can say about it, to be honest. It's not the best protest song Bob ever wrote (in the loosest sense of the word, I'd say "Hard Rain" qualifies; if you're talking more straightforward, probably "Blowin' in the Wind", forgive the cliched answer), nor is it the worst (I'll leave that answer as an exercise for you, the reader). What makes it a step down from some of his truly great songs isn't the fact that he knocked the song out in such a short span of time - Lord knows he's written his fair share of songs in a short period of time. The reason, then, is more just the fact that the song doesn't really reach the same poetic heights of something like "Hard Rain", opting instead to be more straightforward in its disgust at Jackson's treatment and sudden death (to the point where we get Bob's first ever recorded profanity!). And that's not necessarily a bad thing - after all, it seems a lot to ask for Bob to try and reach those heights - so much as it's just a limiting thing you have to get used to. The Bob that wrote those amazing protest songs had been long gone, even by then. The new Bob, the one trying to piece together a brand new writing style, was never going to write "Hard Rain" again.

And, I think, that's entirely what Bob had in mind. "George Jackson" was never really meant to be anything other than exactly what it was - Bob speaking his mind about a major issue of the moment, committing something to tape that could be immediately processed, not giving a hoot about posterity or what future generations would think about the song from a creative standpoint. After all, songs like these aren't really meant to be creative masterpieces, but rallying points, ways for outrage to be properly channeled and given an actual voice. In that sense, "George Jackson" does very well succeed.

Bob Dylan Song #159: When I Paint My Masterpiece

2010-02-18T08:16:00.001-08:00

This is a post that, in a way, almost writes itself. If ever there was a Dylan track that would qualify as my all-time sneaky favorite, it would be "When I Paint My Masterpiece", one of those songs that always seems to slip through the cracks when people talk about Bob's classics (some might append that classification to "Watching The River Flow", I think). What I really love about the song is just how laid-back Bob sounds on it, like he really is singing about chilling out in Rome and thinking about when he finally finishes his life's work. One almost wishes that it was true - that instead of being in upstate New York all this time, he'd actually been crossing the Continent by train, suitcase in hand, living it up with a big Derek Flint grin on his face. And the musicians help set that mood from the start, Leon Russell's piano leading us into a bevy of wry guitar solos and a gently propulsive rhythm. One imagines that this is the sound of Bob not taking himself all too seriously (much like the Christmas album, as a matter of fact - what is "Must Be Santa" if not one of his all-time great pisstakes?), and it's hard not to want him to do that more often.

Much has been made about how this song and "Watching The River Flow" are musical twins in that they depict Bob at his creative low point (well, until the mid-80s, of course), fumbling around for ways to relight his creative muse, none of them working until the ultimate torch arrived in the form of Bob's crumbling marriage. What occasionally seems to be lost in that assessment is the fact that both of the songs that are seemingly about Bob's fallow creative period are, of course, pretty darn good on their own, some of the best stuff that Bob released in this decade. And, rather amusingly, both of the songs manage to attack the subject in roughly the same way, with the musical equivalent of a good-natured shrug of the shoulders. If Bob really has lost his creative muse, he's doing a pretty darn good job of showing us that he could care less.

If there is one obvious difference between the songs, though, it would be the fact that Bob puts us in two different locales (and maybe even mindsets) in the two separate songs. "Watching The River Flow"'s narrator is basically all by himself, sitting in a cafe and staring out at the Mississippi or whatever rushing on by - there's something almost Zen-like in the way he talks about how the river keeps rolling along, no matter what happens - and just musing about how funny the ol' human race can actually be. In "When I Paint My Masterpiece", on the other hand, we're deposited right smack in the middle of some European vacation, a rush of memories coursing through the narrator's brain as he moves from country to country looking for the next big adventure and getting a kick out of, you guessed it, how funny the ol' human race can actually be. That the song still manages to retain its laid-back tone is really something; Bob's telling us a story about how strange his life is without being able to write that one masterpiece he's been waiting on (then again, most artists always feel this way), and yet it feels so casual, like he's relating this tale into a tape recorder sitting poolside in Malibu. It's a relaxed song about a hectic subject, which is always fun.

One is tempted, especially when doing a project like the one I'm embarking on, to speculate about whether or not Bob really did miss that hectic life at the time. Now, real life kind of answers that question all by itself, as Bob slowly worked his way back into the limelight before Tour '74 re-established him as one the biggest rock stars in the world. But that was a gradual process, one that went from recording new material to appearing in a movie to putting together a brand new album for a brand new record label. And yet, in 1971, there was still no real indication that Bob was ever going to go back out on the road, or release something like Planet Waves, or be anything other than a father and a husband. All people really had to speculate on were rumors, innuendo, and then these songs. And while most people tend to think of them as Bob talking about how his muse had done a runner, it's also possible to speculate on that second song, on Bob writing about the hustle and bustle of a life on the run, walking up the Spanish Steps and feeling history below his feet, and missing it just a little bit. The world was not as easy to reach then as it was now, and one imagines there were some nights in New York where our man Bob was getting just a touch antsy.

And, soon enough, that hustle and bustle would be back in Dylan's life. As much as we think about how hectic and crazy 1965-66 were for Bob, I don't think enough attention gets paid to just how wild the mid-70s were for the man; after all, for all of Bob's religious studies after he broke his neck, he didn't become a full-on Christian, for Pete's sake. After all, between Planet Waves and Slow Train Coming, Bob released a slew of albums that ranged from "quite good" to "absolute classics" (including what might very well be his masterpiece), embarked on four massive tours (including a World Tour that led to his voice's irrevocable damage and that aforementioned conversion), and forcefully re-injected himself into the lifestyle that a rock star of his stature tends to lead. That's a hell of a lot for one man to do. You wonder, though, if Bob would have had it any other way.

Bob Dylan Song #158: Tomorrow Is A Long Time

2010-02-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

I've always wondered what it was about "Tomorrow is a Long Time" that appealed to Elvis Presley so much, to the point where he would record his own version for one of his crappy movie soundtracks (the phrase "crappy" can apply to both the movie and the soundtrack, in general). Quite frankly, I wonder why Elvis would bother with a Dylan song at all; after all, this is a guy who used to joke when he had bad breath that "it feels like Bob Dylan's been sleeping in my mouth". But we have Elvis' version of this song nonetheless, and it's a surprisingly good version, a down-home Mississippi Delta touch attached to the tune, Elvis putting in a pretty decent vocal performance (although there are moments where he does something with his voice that reminds me why I don't like him more than I think I ought to, if that makes sense), a casual take on a love song that succeeds because it's so darn casual and laid back. You'd never have thought to turn the song into a crawling blues track, but Elvis and his producers did, and they get kudos for that.

Funny enough, the Elvis version is probably the reason why Bob chose to record the song in a bluesier style for the New Morning sessions, a version that would be left in the vaults yet again. Listening to the song, you can definitely tell that Bob had that version in mind, both in the literal (the slower, more blues-like arrangement, with a pedal steel doing some nice work) and in the more abstract (the "ah-ooh" backing vocals reminiscent of the Jordanaires, the somewhat amateurishly picked solos), although Bob fleshes things out a little more with his full New Morning band behind him. One presumes that this version was never going to have a shot at making the album - especially considering how much more jazz-influenced the official version would end up being - so listening to it can feel more academic than anything else, like it's Bob just having a goof in the studio before he got to "One More Weekend" or whatever. All the same, it's a fun goof, a nice little window into Bob's mind, and a weirdly fitting tribute to Elvis that works just as well as "Went To See The Gypsy" does.

And yet, for somebody like me that has such great affection for the Greatest Hits II version, recorded for what was supposed to be Bob Dylan In Concert way back in 1963, there's something kind of blasphemous about these bluesy recordings, like Elvis and Dylan are taking something chaste and pure and slapping some mud on it. That isn't to say that I don't like those versions, or that there's something wrong with turning a tune into a blues number; it's more that the original version, so beautifully downcast and gentle, so full of quiet wistfulness, is probably best served in its original state, a gently picked acoustic guitar the only accompaniment to Bob's gorgeous lyrics (some of his best of the acoustic era). It makes a kind of sense that this song, like "Mama, You Been On My Mind", was consigned to the vaults upon its release; both songs are as direct in their emotion as any Bob has ever recorded, and maybe Bob didn't want anybody to get the wrong idea.

Of all the emotions that Bob has managed to capture in his lyrics - anger, disdain, happiness, joy, pain, agony - the one that he never really quite gets to is loneliness; he's sung about isolation, but that's not quite the same thing. For whatever reason, we never get to hear much about the great loneliness that Bob must have felt all throughout his life, both in the literal sense (the 1966 tour springs to mind), and in the mental (that mind of his keeping people away by mere virtue of his almost crushing genius); we know so much about Bob in his public life that any glimpse at the private Bob, no matter how fleeting, is as treasured as gold. And that is what makes "Tomorrow is a Long Time" so valuable, because we get a very small glimpse at Bob singing about loneliness, even in the context of a love song, as he waits for his true love to be back with him and spins off words that tell us just how hard that wait can be. But, to me, what really sums up the loneliness of the song (more so than the lyrics, which I think I will get some disagreement over, and I don't blame you) is Dylan's performance, one of his most brutally direct of his early days, a quiet emotion in his voice not even heard on his most well-known classics. I hear that song and I think of that young man, all by himself, singing about his beloved, and it's as heart-wrenching as anything I could imagine. And yet I cannot help but listen to it over and over again, because of that heartache, and because it's so beautiful in its sadness. There's plenty of that in Bob's catalog, but few songs touch that emotion as well as this one does.

Bob Dylan Song #157: Watching the River Flow

2010-02-10T08:35:00.000-08:00

My sincerest apologies to those of you that assumed my discussion of Greil Marcus' review of Self Portrait would cease with the "Alberta #2" post, but I found myself thinking of that album, and rather specifically the bit about Dylan's responsibilities to his audience, during my most recent listen to "Watching the River Flow", one of a handful of original songs Bob recorded between 1970 and 1974's Planet Waves. Listening to Dylan kick the tune off with those fateful words "What's the matter with me?/I don't have much to say", then talk about sitting on a beach somewhere and watching the inexorable progress of some random waterway, one can only assume that Marcus must have been livid. After all, compare Self Portrait, in which Bob makes what could be interpreted as a symbolic retreat from the arena, to this song, in which Bob straight up admits it to all of us. I dunno - were I in Marcus' shoes, I think I might be kinda pissed.

I bet Dylan thought of this, too. Maybe he didn't have Marcus on his mind per se (it's worth wondering if Bob, in 1971, actually knew who Greil Marcus WAS), but I like to think he had a little smile on his face as he penned the words to this song, dreaming up a surrogate Bob wandering some deserted coastline, finding that all night cafe on the beach, having a cup of joe, and staring at the water rushing by. More specifically, I think of those middle eights Bob conjured up, where he sees people disagreeing about God knows what (and he's right - it really DOES make you want to stop and read a book) and just shakes his head knowingly to himself. It was not all too long ago that Young Bob was out there disagreeing with people himself, first in the protest songs that he wrote, then in his views on how his music should sound, to the point where he found himself really shook (and, if some people are to be believed, crying) on that Newport stage. It would only stand to reason that Older and Wiser Bob would be able to write so wittily and intelligently about that.

"Watching the River Flow" would be a fun song if Dylan had picked up an acoustic and sang about his casual acceptance of what sounds like one bitch of a case of writer's block, but the song is made all the more fun by his studio band, who bring a touch of 70's AM rock to Dylan's palette of recording tricks. From the moment that guitar solo comes ripping out of your speakers, it's clear that Dylan's in a rakish mood, and the song boogies along at a nice bluesy clip, Leon Russell's pounding piano mixing well with more radio-friendly soloing and a bouncy bass line. Dylan, for his part, appears to be having a grand old time, barking out his vocals in that 70s voice I've always considered his best. One imagines that, in the hands of somebody like Badfinger, the song might have become an even bigger hit. Instead, it just barely missed the top 40, and ended up on a Columbia stopgap; given the laid-back nature of the song, that's probably how it should be anyway.

I always liked that Bob chose to start off his 2nd (and, remarkably, more essential) Greatest Hits collection with this song, an amusing admission of his current fallow period leading off a collection of songs that demonstrated just how amazing he was when all his creative juices were flowing. What's made Bob so fascinating, along with the music and the myths and the history and all that, is that you really can't pin any kind of mental process upon the man, no matter how hard we try to shoehorn him into our preconceived notions. The same man who has enough self-awareness to wink at his audience with this song had the somewhat puzzling naivete to think that his conversion to Christianity would be well-received when he took it on the road (well, perhaps; he probably knew people would be surprised, but I'm not sure he knew he'd whip up 1965-levels of invective). The same man who exhibited the rigid self-control of his days in the upstate New York woods as he cared for his family and grew closer to his wife essentially fell to pieces on the 2nd leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue, drinking himself into constant stupors as his marriage crumbled around him. And the same man who released some of the greatest albums ever recorded, leaving only a paucity of worthy tracks in the vaults in favor of legendary classics, essentially consigned three or four of his best songs of the 1980s to outtake status when putting together Infidels, maybe the most disappointing moment in his canon. That's all human nature, of course, to be that inconsistent; but it's human nature on a grand scale, and that's always interesting.

"Watching the River Flow", in its own way, is an encapsulation of part of Dylan's human nature, and a part that brings him closer to us. Having made mention in the previous post of the elusiveness of creativity, it's funny to hear a song where Bob directly addresses that elusiveness, fully admitting that the process is beyond his understanding ("What's the matter with me?") and not giving a damn anyway. It's kind of rare to see Dylan engaging his audience as directly (relatively speaking) as he does here, and it's all the better that he does it in such an amusing way. Who knows, maybe even Greil Marcus had to have been okay with that.

Bob Dylan Song #318: Mama, You Been On My Mind

2010-02-07T05:55:00.001-08:00

Okay, so.

I had a special post all typed out, I really did. I was going to do one of those "author interviewing himself" conceits, where I asked myself these pertinent questions about where I was in my life, why I'd put this blog on its longest hiatus yet, and whether or not I was really prepared to see this through to the bitter end (I mean, look at that post title - I'm not even halfway to reaching THIS song, let alone the last one!). But, to be quite honest, nobody needs to read all that, especially in light of all the emotional gushing that will soon commence in the post proper. So I've instead condensed said special post into three questions and answers:

Q. Where the hell were you?
A. It's like John Lennon said - "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

Q. Why this song?
A. Because the time to write about it was right, for me at least. Normal chronological order will resume after this post - I just wanted to get this out of my system. If this somehow seems like a cheat, I apologize. I fully acknowledge that this post is the rare one that's more for me than anybody else.

Q. Will you continue this project?
A. Yes. I don't know how regular I'll keep things, but I will do my level best to maintain at least some sort of schedule. That anybody reads this at all is amazing, and it's at the point now that I want people to keep reading and to look forward to what I do. It means more than you could ever know, believe me.

And so back I go into the maelstrom. Just a heads up - this gets into some REALLY emo shit. If you're not prepared or that sort of thing doesn't suit you, I suggest you come back later in the week. Trust me.

Second heads up: this baby is LONG. Again, don't say I didn't warn you.

A FEW SELECTIONS FROM A LONGER ESSAY ABOUT BOB DYLAN'S "MAMA, YOU BEEN ON MY MIND"

I once had a girl

Or should I say

She once had me...

- John Lennon

(1)

When people (up to and including myself) talk about how Bob Dylan's lyrics are "poetic", I feel like the vast majority of those people are referring to Dylan's more out-there lyrics, stuff like "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Gates of Eden" that push the envelope of what was previously considered to be acceptable things to sing while simultaneously strumming a guitar and/or being backed by a band of musicians. Which makes sense - it's not so much that Dylan was doing things like messing with time signatures or fiddling with the verse/chorus/verse dynamic (his deeply ingrained musical instincts probably would not let him do this), as much as he was pushing the boundaries of what you can do with words, how you can arrange them in ways that impact others emotionally without directly attempting to ENGAGE them emotionally, and of the subject matter that people can sing about. And I think that many of us engage poetry in that same way; we've grown accustomed enough to the works of Eliot and Plath and Ginsburg and Sexton and so on that we think of poetry not as something straightforward, but as a way to push the boundaries of both the spoken and written English language, something that takes us to the further edges of what we can do with that language, for better or for worse.

I bring all this up not because I believe I'm telling you all something you don't already know, but because it's elucidating for me in general to think about things in other ways. After all, not all poetry bothers to push the envelope, or to do something entirely different from tradition, and yet that poetry can still hit on an emotional level. Think of something like "Dulce et Decorum Est", or "To His Coy Mistress", neither of which go crazy with the metaphors or fuck with accepted rhyme schemes or anything, but both hit on an emotional level while bending words into something beautiful (even in the ugliness of World War I, in the former's case). And I'm sure it doesn't REALLY bear stating, but you can apply that to Dylan's less wildly imaginative lyrics, songs from his acoustic era or from something like Planet Waves, where Dylan can keep himself firmly grounded in the language that you and I speak every day (or, sometimes, wish we could) and still make us go "wow, that was something else".

And, to me, the quintessential example of Dylan's genius in this regard is the first verse of "Mama, You Been On My Mind", one of the greatest songs he wrote and never released on an album. I'm reprinting it here simply because I cannot help myself:

Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat

And covering these crossroads I'm standing at,

Or maybe it's the weather, or something like that,

But mama, you been on my mind.

To me, at least, I cannot think of any better way to try and explain what it is about love that cannot be explained, and to put something tangible on a feeling that, so very often, eludes our grasp. We all know that often something as innocuous as a song on the radio or seeing an ad for a restaurant can bring back memories both good and bad (I had one such moment last night, as a matter of fact - damn you, Van Morrison!), but we can find ourselves forgetting that sometimes it doesn't even take THAT much to trigger our memory banks, and sometimes we find ourselves drifting back to past beloved entirely of our own accord, almost like an acid flashback or something. Dylan manages to capture both sides in four truly amazing lines, reaching both to the specificity of an image that reminded him of somebody, and to the generality of a mood that hits you when you don't expect it. It's really something that I cannot fathom.

I had a conversation once with one of my friends, in which I was attempting to describe why exactly it was I felt a certain way about somebody else. I said that I could make a list of all the reasons why I was enamored, from the more obvious physical aspects to the way that she engaged me on an intellectual level to the fact that she had a fondness for things that I, too, had a fondness for. But, ultimately, the reason I felt that certain way about that somebody was because I simply did. I mean, that sort of thing is more animal than human to begin with (which I'll get to in greater detail), and on a gut level it really just comes down to synapses firing in your brain in ways you could not possibly imagine. But, us being who we are, we find ways to justify those firings of our synapses, and we turn what would be simple nature into something deeper and more meaningful. As I'd written in a previous post, the feeling tends to come before the rational; first comes love, then you sort of have to fill in the blanks. But filling in the blanks makes us who we are.

What I love about that first verse of "Mama, You Been On My Mind" is that Bob never bothers to delve into that conundrum at all. Of course, given the constraints of songwriting and such there just wasn't enough room anyway, but it's still impressive to see Bob condense such a markedly difficult emotional issue into a short gut punch of a verse and then immediately move on, secure in the knowledge that we all know what he's talking about. And we all do, of course - much like that feeling you can only express in French where you could've sworn something happening to you has already happened, we all know what it means to remember something from our past with both a meaningful prompt and with no prompt at all. We all just can't sum that feeling up the same way Bob can.

(2)

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, one of my great failings as a human being is that I have the potential to be an utterly selfish prick on an emotional level; you know, the old "look out for number 1" thing. I can be totally willing to sever a personal relationship (friend or otherwise) with a female at the drop of a hat if I think that relationship is causing me hurt, and I'm pretty sure I could do it without too much effort. And, in the same honest vein, one of the things that is pretty good about me as a human being is that I am aware of that selfishness potential, and that I deal with it in much the same way that people deal with quarantined viruses. After all, once you've connected with somebody on any meaningful level, even if it is just plain ol' friendship, you have a responsibility for that connection, to maintain it and even try to make it grow, and to cut it in half just because of your own base feelings is a pretty boorish thing to do. It's sad that I need to remember that, but I thank my lucky stars that I can, and that I can put aside my own bullshit to have actual meaningful friendships with the opposite sex. It would be a real black mark on me as a person if I couldn't.

One of the hardest things to deal with is when somebody you have feelings for harbors those same feelings for somebody else. This, again, is not something I think you all don't know. What is even harder is to feel, if not happiness for that person, at least a sort of Zen acceptance, a security that you can dispense with the hurt that that knowledge brings. It, like so much of human personality, is an acquired skill; still, having that skill is almost astonishingly important, if only for our own peace of mind. To be able to wish somebody well is nice; to wish somebody well and actually mean it is some next level shit. I will fully admit that I struggle with that skill on a daily basis (and it's much harder these days), but I'm well aware that the person I'm struggling with would appreciate that I'm even making the effort. If I couldn't, I might as well give up and go live in a cabin in the woods.

When Dylan sings "I don't even mind who you'll be waking with tomorrow", it is hard not to marvel at that moment. It is both the most devastating moment in the song, and somehow the most uplifting at the exact same time. I don't need to really tell you what's devastating about it on one level; I still remember being told by the woman I love that she was moving in with her boyfriend, and what a horrible crushing blow that was for me. And on another level, the one where you've reached that kind of acceptance (or resignation, as the case may be), the line takes on an even more devastating effect. But uplifting? Yes, I truly do believe that. That line, and the sentiment behind that, is a statement from a man that truly believes what he's saying, that does not care that his beloved will be waking up in the bed of somebody else, because she's still part of who he is, no matter what. And that's uplifting in the sense that so often we tend to try to cut the hurt out of us, rather than attempting to understand that hurt and make it work for us. When you lose somebody in that way, a piece of you gets torn out, and it's all too easy to let that piece disappear without ever trying to replace it. It really is better to keep that piece where it is, if only for the memory.

Not to immediately bring things back down, but I've often thought about the things that separate us human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom, usually because there's far more crossover than we would like to admit. Even love, our greatest attribute as a human race in so many ways, can be explained on a molecular level, where the general idea of "attraction" has a lot more to do with our hormones than with rational thought. I mean, it makes sense, of course; even if you discount all the scientific crap, just think about how often relationships tend to fail. We all can understand the idea behind wanting to knock it out with somebody else - it's when you get to shit like meeting parents and thinking about looking for an apartment together that things become murky and complicated. Fill in the blanks, remember. We don't always do the best job of that. And that's why love isn't always the greatest thing (as Damon Albarn once sang); the actual emotion itself can be found amongst jungle cats or what have you, and they don't have to worry about how two sets of friends would interact at a bar on Friday night.

So, to me at least (and perhaps this is just my own slightly jaundiced view at work), what really does separate us from animals and makes us something special is that we can be hurt by love. After all, you never hear of an orangutan crying and listening to Morrissey records, or of a house cat trying to win another house cat back by playing "In Your Eyes" on a boom box, and so on. I know how silly that sounds, and I even kinda did that on purpose, but the general idea is that we are the only race for whom the romantic-based rejection of another member of our species hurts us on an emotional level, one that we have to intellectualize in order to properly deal with it. We can intellectualize love, of course, but on a gut level we know why it exists and how it really works. I don't think we have that same gut level with rejection; trying to make sense of it the best way that we can, whether through hurt, rage, acceptance, and so on, is an entirely different being altogether. In a way, it's even a beautiful thing - the fact that we cannot simply dismiss a mate walking away, that we have to put things together in our mind and compartmentalize it in order to function at all, says a lot about just how important that really is to us. It's an idea that always strikes me as sad, and as profound. Funny how those two words so often mean the same thing.

(3)

Why don't we ever hear more about who Bob's singing about in this song? So much about Dylanology (of which I grudgingly include this humble little blog) centers around the various women that have populated Bob's life and how he has worked his relationships (both the good and the bad times - more bad than good, rather unfortunately) into his songs. Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo, Sara Lowndes - we always find ourselves reading the tea leaves, looking for those faces, almost to the point where you need to stop and just ask yourself, well, why? Why do we bother? Is there really a point? And, as a corollary, how has a song THIS nakedly emotional and full of heartache slipped through the cracks?

Creativity, like so much of our human experience, is an ethereal concept. I mean, that's pretty obvious (nobody's selling "creativity juice" at the local supermarket), but it's also something that we feel like we need to deal with, even though we don't know how. William Goldman, as great a screenwriter that has ever lived, stated that he has no idea where his creativity comes from, but he lived in a never-ending fear of simply waking up one day to find that his spark has deserted him forever, never to return. And that's somebody who legitimately has/had that spark, who has written some of the most enduring motion pictures ever made. For the rest of us average punters, the idea of creativity on that level is even harder to fathom, like attempting to wrap our minds around Foucault's Pendulum without the requisite Ph.D. in astrophysics. Creativity, in that sense, is almost certainly something legitimately scary, a mutant power that taunts us even while astonishing us when others harness that power to create amazing works of art. Like a lot of the Big Concepts, it is something that totally eludes us.

And that, I think, plays into why people so often look for Dylan's paramours in his music. The concept of the muse, as old as it is, is one that a lot of us can wrap our minds around. Hell, the whole concept was almost certainly conceived so that the ancient Greeks and Romans COULD wrap their minds around something as astounding as creativity, an otherworldly explanation for why people could write poems or music or whatever that fit in quite well with the whole "multitude of gods" thing they had going on. But even today the idea still has its place, mainly because its base concept is something we can get behind. Surely it was the love/hate of another woman that drove Dylan to write those masterpieces, and nothing else, right? I mean, it's kind of a reductive concept, no matter how true it is (if "Ballad in Plain D" is NOT about Suze Rotolo, then Bob has some serious explaining to do), but it's still one that's easy for us to grasp. It's annoying as hell, but I can understand it.

Which, I suppose, brings us back to this song, and why nobody has made an effort (or maybe they have, and I've willfully ignored it) to tie "Mama, You Been On My Mind" to any number of women that have been in Bob's life. I mean, it's not like you couldn't make a very easy case, given the time frame the song was written in and so forth. But I kind of like the fact that the song has sort of been left untouched in that sense, that it's not scrutinized in the same way that some of Dylan's more famous songs have been, and that it's mainly been left to stand on its own considerable artistic and lyrical merits. It lends the song a little additional weight that occasionally gets denied from the Webermans of the world trying to read between the lines. For a song this good, that's incredibly appreciated.

(4)

I've said that "Like A Rolling Stone" is my favorite Bob Dylan song, maybe my favorite song by anybody ever, and that's not going to change. But if I had to choose the song that meant the most to me on an emotional level, the song that's nearest and dearest to my heart without bringing in any intellectual considerations, it would surely be "Mama, You Been On My Mind". I mean, I love the song on an intellectual level, of course - it's as perfect an example as you could ask for of purely economical songwriting, of communicating an astounding amount of deep feelings and ideas on a personal scale, performed in Bob's straightforward manner that manages to suggest the well of emotions the song carries without needing to dip into it just to score a few extra points. A lot of Young Bob's genius is summed up in this song, and that's something I can truly appreciate.

But, as you might expect, it's what Bob is actually singing about that gives the song such heft in my eyes. Speaking as somebody that was in love with somebody for a VERY long time, I can't help but identify with every word Bob sings in this song; memories being brought forth just by the weather or something, asking her not to be upset by my frame of mind, not minding who she wakes up with, and that final stinging verse where Bob asks the mystery woman of the song if she could ever see herself as clearly and as vividly as he, himself, carrying her memory deep inside of his cerebral cortex. It's such a powerful moment, and one so evocative of what it means to not just love somebody, but to care about them as well - this notion that we can see them better than they can see themselves. There is great truth to that; why else would we talk about our problems with our friends than because we need a voice that's not our own to help us puzzle out what's going on with us? And it's moments like that where I find myself utterly swept away, hearing somebody explain the pain and emotion I'm feeling better than I ever could. Everything about what art is, and why art matters, crystallizes for me when I hear this song.

I don't presume to suggest that I know why art matters, for the record; I'm simply not that smart. I will say, though, that I have an idea. The concept of the muse, that I briefly touched on before, can seem quite silly on its face, but it does serve an important purpose - it helps us make tangible something that is rather clearly not. And for people in general, just the idea that we can make SOMETHING that we have trouble understanding a little more easy to wrap our minds around is truly important indeed. I mean, just take a second and think about the nature of the cosmos, and infinity, and what that actually means. Thinking about that without a shit ton of postgraduate work, a massively high IQ, or a pharmacy's worth of illegal drugs is nigh impossible. But we've all been to a planetarium, we've all seen the stars in the sky and heard about white dwarfs and black holes and sound bouncing out millions of miles away and so on, and that sort of helps us understand a little better and come a little closer to touching what seems so very far away. We need that in our lives.

And I think we can agree that the whole idea of art, at least on a level beyond "I want to watch guns go boom and cars explode" or "I'm going to read this romantic novel about forbidden love with the guy with a six-pack of abs on the cover", is to help us understand what we cannot, or what we find hard to deal with. Why do you think there are so many damn songs about us getting our hearts broken? Because we all know what it's like to get our hearts broken, and we so very rarely know how to deal with an emotion so powerful and gut-wrenching. And it's that knowledge that allows us to identify with music, or books, or movies; the knowledge that, even if they don't specifically know why we're hurting or why we're happy or angry or whatever emotion it is we're feeling, the artists we love can channel THEIR own hurt or anger or happiness into what they create, and that gets filtered to us on our own levels. It's probably a stretch to say that artists understand us, but there is enough universality in who we are as humans that artists, in attempting to understand themselves and what they're feeling, tend to land on our issues as well. It's rather convenient how that works.

We all have moments in our lives where we feel that we're all alone, and that nobody understands us and what we're going through. That's often nonsense (there's only so much we as humans can go through, really), and yet it's such a strong feeling, simply because nobody ever has the same experience in the same way. To have something in my life that helps sort out that feeling, whether it's a good friend or a great book, is impossible to overstate in terms of importance. And, at the most basic level, I'm happy that I can cue up this song, hear a much younger Bob Dylan (a man younger than I am now when he recorded the track) singing about a mindset I know all too well, and say to myself "you know...Bob Dylan understands".

Every Bob Dylan Song will return...

2009-12-11T19:36:00.000-08:00

...soon.

Aren't I a tease?

Thank you all for your support and well wishes. A full explanation - and something both a bit special and a bit off the beaten track - is forthcoming. Stay tuned.

Bob Dylan Song #156: Father of Night

2009-10-02T08:36:00.001-07:00

"Three thousand years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax - YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I'M LIVING IN THE (expletive) PAST!" - John Goodman in The Big Lebowski

Now, while the previous song had baffled me in a way that I'm embarrassed to think about even now, "Father of Night" somehow manages to make a perfect, almost serene sense. On an album that has evoked such gentle images of pastoral life and quiet solitude (except with a lady, of course), there's something kind of nice about Bob offering up his version of a Jewish prayer as the album's end, sort of a droll Hebrew equivalent of T.S. Eliot's "shantih shantih shantih" or something. And the presentation is gorgeous - running a mere 92 seconds (surely Bob's shortest song ever), opened with a nifty little bit of singing from Bob's backup singers that occasionally repeats throughout, Dylan offers up a simple and plaintive paean to the God of the Torah that he'd worshiped as a young man. It's beautiful, no two ways about it, and a fine ending to an album that hearkens for the simple life he knew as that boy in Hibbing, before rock and roll, Woody Guthrie, and fistfuls of barbituates changed everything.

One of my friends from Michigan is an atheist raised in a Jewish family, and while she continues to not believe in a God, she still makes it a point to observe all the Jewish holidays and traditions and pay homage to the faith in which she was raised. I'm not going to lie - I found that odd when I'd first heard about it (she's not going to read this, so I feel safe mentioning it, although I'm sure she'd be fine with it anyway), as most people that don't believe in God tend to have something less than a favorable opinion about faith in general, and especially in the traditions and occasional prejudices that make up the world's religions. But the more I thought about it, the more respect I have for her stance - even though she has objection to the one principle that binds this entire group of people together, she finds enough worthy in the sort of cultural framework that's sprung up around this group and their devotion to that principle that she's decided to remain a willing participant. It really is an extraordinary thing.

I'm jumping way ahead here, but one of the most remarkable facts of Dylan's career in retrospect, something that I think doesn't get nearly the play that it deserves, was Dylan's conversion to Christianity. It isn't that it's not understandable, so much as it was a fervor that gripped him with remarkable tightness and then loosened itself almost as fast (I've seen pictures of Bob in his yarmulke in the mid-80s). What tends to get lost in the whole thing, though, between the controversy over the music he made and his infamous battles with the crowds in Tempe and all that, is just how deeply human it actually makes Bob. After all, what is more human in the experience of life than the search for a greater truth, a higher plane of existence beyond mortal flesh and blood, and the search for the reason why we're here in the first place? I'm not saying that I consider Bob some sort of demigod, so much as I'm saying that Bob's crisis of faith gives us something to hang our hat on, something we can relate to, just as much as the adultery and the boozing and drug use and occasional terrible albums are things we can relate to. Bob becomes much more enjoyable, I'm starting to find, when he's not on the pedestal that (it has to be said) things like this blog put him on.

And a song like "Father of Night", which has no other purpose than recasting the Amidah into a short little tune to close out a short little album, is just as much a part of that equation that makes Bob a flesh and blood man. His faith (aside from the Christian years, of course) has never been much of a talking point; we knew he was Jewish (I mean, Zimmerman? C'mon, now), but it was never overtly shoved in our faces at any point in his career. And when he does decide to pay a little homage to his old faith, he does it in as low-key a way as possible, paring down his language almost to the point where you can see bone, singing simple words to the Lord of Abraham and Ezekiel. As mantras go, it's pretty hard to top.

And that's it for New Morning! Coming up next - the three unwritten songs from the 2nd Greatest Hits, "Billy" and "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"...then Dylan's second great creative period. I cannot wait. Hope you all join me on the trip!

Bob Dylan Song #155: Three Angels

2009-10-02T08:07:00.000-07:00

I'm not really sure what to make of "Three Angels". As we come to a close on New Morning, it seems kind of strange for Dylan to suddenly pull out a gospel-inflected (check out that organ!) philosophical piece about angels hovering above us as people go off and live their little humdrum lives, never stopping to see if they can find the ethereal so close to the mundane. It's not that it's a bad song, at all - it's kind of like Bob's "Everybody Hurts", only with a little less universality and a little more slice-of-life lyricism - so much as it's a really odd downer at the end of the album, especially given the one-two-three punch that had preceded it. There's something that just seems a little off, I can't tell you what.

It isn't that Bob hasn't given us character pieces in the past (what is "Ballad of a Thin Man" if not a character piece?) or delved into everyday life in a metaphysical way. What makes the song seem strange to me is that Dylan gives us a really good example of the keen eye that he has as a songwriter, whipping up a little slice of life that gives us well-observed details and people seemingly snatched right off the street - but for what purpose? A two-minute throwaway tacked on the end of the album because it would've sounded even stranger coming after "Winterlude" or something? Maybe it's just the sequencing, then; but that still doesn't explain why there's something lacking about the whole thing. Could it be the length? The weird Christian underpinning that sort of but doesn't really jibe with what's going on with the rest of the album? Maybe it's just another experiment Bob decided to try, giving us a speak-sung O. Henry pastiche set to music? Baffling.

It occurs to me, typing these words, that I'm probably doing a 180 on the stuff that I've typed in the past, where I've chastised others (and myself) for looking for too much or thinking too hard about one of Bob's songs, and that I should just listen and enjoy the song for what it is. And I think I still do that, or at the very least make an effort to do that and not let my feelings about the music get overwhelmed by what I'd like to talk about for the song's blog post. But a song like this...I mean, where do I really go? I've talked about Dylan's nice usage of imagery (the U-Haul truck in particular manages to be the most evocative, and I'm not really sure why), and about Bob reaching into his John Wesley Harding Biblical playbook, only with a little less subtlety, and about how the song touches on a very deep and spiritual subject for a few minutes before coming to an abrupt end. That doesn't seem to leave too much out.

The disappointment I feel at moments like these, where the (usually latent) limitations of this project I've undertaken and enjoyed so often become glaringly apparent, is something I wouldn't wish on any Dylan fan. It can be said about Dylan that even his bad music gives you something to talk about (the last two-three months prior to this album should've been proof of that), and his good music can encompass our whole wide world in terms of subjects of conversation. That, of course, is something that can be said about most great artists in most of the artistic fields. And, let it once again be said, I think that this is a fine song, maybe even a good song. I know that there are bigger fans of this song than I, people that are more likely to tell me something they love about this song that I may have missed, and people that are more than happy to elucidate on why this deserves a deeper look than I'd given it. And believe me when I say that I would be more than happy to hear them out.

Bob Dylan Song #154: The Man In Me

2009-09-28T08:52:00.001-07:00

I want you all to try something. Take a really good, catchy, emotionally resonant song - say, "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, which I've been listening to quite a bit lately. Now, find a scene from any movie that you can think of, one that might match the emotional resonance that "Maps" has, and might sound and look good when paired up with that song. But remember - we're not just looking for something that might work well when "Maps" is playing in the background. We're looking for a scene in which the music and the scene on film work as damn close to perfection as you could ever hope for, where what the director is going for on screen is in sync with Karen O's declarations of unmatched love on "Maps", to the point in which you cannot think of one without the other, and vice versa. Oh, and one more thing - we want this little pairing you've put together to run as the title sequence of the movie you've chosen. Think you can do it?

It says a lot about what incredible filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen are (well, with a hat-tip to T-Bone Burnett) that they managed to do just that, pairing a lesser-known Bob Dylan album deep cut with images of people bowling in slow-motion, shoes being sprayed, balls rolling across alleyways...and making it work to absolute perfection. It doesn't even matter that what Bob's singing about - a paean to loving somebody, maybe even his wife, with unflagging emotion and with apparently no hint of irony whatsoever - it still sounds like the most natural pairing in the world (I would find the title sequence on YouTube, but for once it appears that I have been let down). And, at least in my humble estimation, the pairing has now reached the point where you cannot hear "The Man In Me" without thinking of Walter chucking his undies out the window in the "ringer" or poor Donnie confusing John Lennon with V.I. Lenin or "I got a bad headache and I hate the fucking Eagles, man!", and you cannot think of The Big Lebowski (the movie I'm talking about, in case you didn't know) without at least once having Bob pop into your head with those glorious "la la la"s. That's something pretty special, a tremendous example of how music and films can be so gloriously intertwined.

Which gets into the heart of the matter with regards to "The Man In Me". Look, I love the song as much as any of you - it's almost impossible not to just like on its aesthetic level. The harmonies at the beginning and chorus, the way the song just explodes to life, Bob singing with unencumbered joy (not something we always get out of him), that fantastic part in the middle eight when Bob sings "but oh, what a wonderful feeling" and the organ in the background matches him step for step. But, I mean...we all know that Dylan can do better lyrically, right? Eyolf Olstrem (yet again) gets it perfectly, when he says the song is "just TOO sweet - things that are too good to be true usually aren't" and notes that while something like "Sara", another song that trucks in naked emotion (of a different kind, true), has its own intrinsic seriousness, "The Man in Me" has "la la la la la". Which, I mean, is fine; but, in the end, when all you've got is Dylan having fun, that only takes you so far.

All the same, that fun is still there, it makes the track worth hearing at least once in your life, and it took a couple of geniuses to draw it out and use it for all it's worth. In my mind, one of the most flattering compliments anybody can pay to a song is to find its niche and to actually pair it with something tangible in that way that filmmakers can. I mean, we all have memories attached to certain songs that set them apart from everybody else - I, for example, have a memory related to Macy Gray's "I Try" that I'm not going to share but means the absolute world to me. We all know that that is what helps make music so special - our visceral reactions to it, and the way that songs and albums and musicians can be threads in the fabric of our life (pardon the cliche). It is something else entirely when somebody has the brains to make a song the fabric of many people's lives, simply by matching that song to something you'll never, ever be able to forget. Think of how many of us now imagine "As Time Goes By", or "Perfect Day", or "Stuck In The Middle With You". To get so many people to hear a song and think about the exact same thing is a skill, and one that precious few people could ever hope to attain.

I'm not saying that "The Man In Me" would have been consigned to the dustbin of history if T-Bone Burnett hadn't told the Coens "maybe it'd work...here?" over a decade ago. The song has enough creative merit on its own that it probably would've been a cult favorite, the same way that you could say that this album has become something of a cult favorite (and, for symmetry's sake, the way that The Big Lebowski is very much a cult favorite). What I am saying is that the song now has a very special appellation to it, which sets it apart even from some of the best songs in Dylan's catalog. I close my eyes when I hear "Like A Rolling Stone", or "Blind Willie McTell", and I see what I want to see in my mind's eye. I close my eyes when I hear "The Man In Me", and I see The Big Lebowski. And many, many other people can hear that song, close their eyes, and also see what I see. I don't know about you, but that's something quite meaningful to me.

Bob Dylan Song #153: One More Weekend

2009-09-25T08:25:00.000-07:00

And with a reprise of that descending blues riff Dylan likes to whip out whenever he's in a rockin' (or, excuse me, "rawkin'") mood, we get one of the most outright fun songs Bob had written in years, a combination of Bob hearkening to the '50s rock-n-roll "two chords and a cloud of dust" mentality (he even starts the song "slippin' and slidin'") and the swaggering bump and grind of "Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat". One wonders what impetus Bob had to interrupt all the pretty, low-key piano-driven tracks (there's piano on this song, make no mistake, but it's mixed pretty low to let some slide guitar work carry the day instead) to break out some barroom raunchiness, but it's a pretty good change-up on this album and something of a welcome mood shifter. After the quiet genius of "Sign on the Window", it's pretty neat to immediately break in with Dylan indulging ol' Elston Gunn.

I suppose if you wanted to buy into the theory brought up in the last post (that the songs here had as much to do with Bob screwing around as anything else), this might be the star witness in the case, so to speak. Quoting bits out of the lyrics doesn't make as much sense as actually reading the lyrics themselves - just look at some of the stuff he talks about. He compares himself to a weasel, for the love of Pete! Sure, you can argue that Bob's trying to sing a song to his wife about spending one more weekend together like things used to be - leaving the kids behind and all that - and just being together. But...I mean, take a look at those lyrics again. Does that sound like the kind of thing you'd sing to the woman you roll over and take a look at every morning, or to the woman that you have a crazy, looking over the shoulder, sleeping together in tawdry motels relationship with? I have a pretty good idea what the answer to that would be.

Okay, I know that I've had the occasional flight of fancy that hasn't really worked out, but try to go with me here for a second. You're listening to this album, one that not only has a general lyrical theme of pastoral life, of songs of love and devotion (to whoever), and of doing things the simple way, but also has a general instrumental motif of piano, loose band arrangements, and so on. In other words, you've got a mood going on this album. And then bang - you've suddenly got a song that's basically a slowed-down, loosey-goosey version of something off of Loud, Fast, and Out of Control, Dylan basically saying "come on, baby, let's go downtown" to some random woman that may or may not - probably may not - be his wife. In other words, the mood's been blasted to smithereens by some nasty lead guitar, and we've gone from strolling in a winter wonderland to whiling away some weekend doing Lord knows what. What are we to make of that?

What we can make of that, I think, is that Dylan's basically written himself the equivalent of an interlude to his little one-act about country life, almost like he's throwing in a dream sequence for the hero to fantasize about when he's peeling potatoes or reading "Jack and the Beanstalk" or something. Consider that the album then goes from "One More Weekend" directly into "The Man In Me" (which I've always figured was meant to be the album's centerpiece and linchpin, especially since the last two songs are short and almost anticlimactic), one of Dylan's most simplistic and direct declarations of love. If you want to assume Dylan's singing about somebody other than his wife in this song (and, I suppose, every other song here by proxy), I can certainly see that. But if you take the album on its face value and assume Dylan's being the family man both in life and in song, then "One More Weekend" takes on a completely different role. And, let's be honest, it's a pretty strong little bit of temptation, to head off on a cruise somewhere away from the kids and from his remote country home. You almost can't blame Bob for eventually succumbing to it.

Bob Dylan Song #152: Sign on the Window

2009-09-25T05:12:00.001-07:00

A quick word or two about the actual song itself, one of my favorite Dylan songs of all time (the "sneaky favorite" of mine on this album, lest you were wondering). There is a bootleg version of this song floating around with a string arrangement kind of rivet-gun attached to the master take, along with (I think) some extra backup singers doing work or some such added frippery. As you'd expect from my description, the extra instrumentation kind of ruins the song, almost Disney-fying one of Dylan's most gorgeous songs and drowning its more simple, piano-driven beauty in the same sort of glop that ruined "The Long And Winding Road". The actual album take, the one that I love so much, works because there's a measure of understatement - the backup singers that are on the track are muted, and the flute solo after the middle eight (well, middle four) works in glorious counterpoint to Bob's piano. And the lyrics - oh, how I love those lyrics. The first verse, with its punch to the gut imagery; that fantastic "Brighton girls are like the moon" line; and, yes, the third verse, which apparently is more divisive opinion-wise than I'd expected. It all adds up to maybe Bob's greatest forgotten masterpiece, and one that maybe will get the attention that it deserves.

Now, then - that third verse. In the "Time Passes Slowly" post, one of the commenters wrote out a long, somewhat detailed comment about how Bob's actually writing songs to and about his mistress, both on this album and on Blood on the Tracks. His reasoning makes quite a bit of sense - it really doesn't make sense to just assume "Simple Twist of Fate" is actually about Sara, does it? And that sort of reasoning tends to color the rest of the album; songs about the good ol' country life, about a woman like you (who?) to find the man in him...they're not really about being happy and married, are they? It's the sort of realization/theory/what have you that makes you reevaluate what you thought about the man; hell, what you think about life in general.

And that's why I'm choosing to ignore it.

No, I'm kidding. I would just prefer to believe that Bob, at that particular moment in his life, meant exactly what it was he was singing about, that he was enjoying himself and the life he'd carved out for himself, or at the very least comfortable and accepting of it. Another commenter, in the "Day of the Locusts" post suggests that Bob's bit about how being a family man must be what it's all about "feels more like uncomfortable resignation to me than joyful enlightenment...like he isn't quite convinced". To me, though, I don't necessarily think it has to be either - Bob's never struck me as the kind of guy who has too high highs (although he's probably had too low lows - think about his mental state during the '76 version of the RTR), and I also think that he's not one to put on a face for the hell of it (if you ever saw pictures of him in 1966, he sure as hell isn't hiding his discomfort and agitation about what's going on around him - the only time he doesn't look awful is when he's on stage). I think Bob's singing those words simply because those words sum up his frame of mind; maybe there's some resignation in "that *must* be what it's all about", but I see him firming that up in his mind, thumping his chest and saying "yes, that really is what life is", just like God knows how many men whose lives have changed when they see their offspring for the first time. Dylan may not have had that frame of mind for long, but he still probably had it (unless you're giving him no benefit of the doubt whatsoever), and that surely counts.

One thing I think doesn't get enough attention, which probably makes sense given how relatively obscure this song is, is just how wild the stuff Bob's singing about in that final verse must have sounded, even after Bob had spent a few years out of the limelight. It's a really remarkable thing; Bob, counterculture icon, writer of "Like A Rolling Stone", telling us that getting married, having kids, and fishing in a cabin in Utah is really what life is all about. Perhaps on a smaller scale, but certainly on a scale, this has to be like what Bob's folk music fans must have felt like when Bob went electric, no? Think about it - you've got your mindset about how the world works, about what this and that means, and your hero, the man you trust above all else to both side with your viewpoints on how the world works and espouse those viewpoints to everybody else, has turned his back and become The Enemy, so to speak. Now, the transformation from electric warrior to "marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout" was slower and more pronounced in this case, but...I mean, really? We're busting our ass out there having protests and calling Nixon a douchenozzle and talking about free love (which, I'm assuming, didn't just die out after 1967) and changing the world, maaaaan - and Bob's singing about kids and shit? What a fucking asshole!

The irony, surely, is that the radical generation of the 60s eventually found themselves thinking Bob's way in the end. It shouldn't be a surprise; how many people say "aw, I ain't ever having kids, I ain't ever getting married - nobody's tethering this bird down, I'm gonna spread my wings and fly!", only to end up at a company BBQ with the mortgage and the station wagon and the son named after your wife's dearly departed father, wondering just how in the hell you got there? Life has a funny way of taking us in places we never expect (unless you're a child prodigy or something); surely Bob at 20 with his Sherpa outfit and blues repertoire or Bob at 25 with his cool-ass shades and Telecaster had no idea that he'd be 29/30, scraggly thin beard on his face, talking walks down a dirt path in the forests of upstate New York and carefully avoiding a world that still wanted to look for him. Maybe that's the real resident emotion of "Sign on the Window" - a sort of bemused wonder, Bob shaking his head with a wry smile at the way his Game of Life went, more pegs in his car than he'd expected and a totally different house than he could've imagined at the start. And maybe he doesn't just have to be talking about marriage and kids - maybe just the fact that things, and outlooks, can change is really what life's all about.

Bob Dylan Song #151: New Morning

2009-09-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

If there's a phrase that you might be able to use as a definition for the generation that I grew up in, for better or ill, it might be "Generation Irony". "Irony", to be honest, is something difficult to pin down; much like the infamous pornography test, you'd probably know it if you saw it. But it's become redolent in our society, something that, when properly utilized, can make something funny and interesting on a deeper level than it might have been otherwise...and, when not properly utilized, is just as aggravating and worthy of disdain as my elders (and even some of my peers) say it is. I think of the brilliant quote from the "Homerpalooza" episode of The Simpsons, in which a Gen-X teenager is asked if he's being sarcastic (the bastard cousin of ironic) and the response is a weary, depressed "I don't even know anymore." There's only really so far you can go with irony, with being detached from what you might consider real life, before that line is completely washed away. And that's not a good thing.

Many people, I think, would agree that the concept of America as an ironic culture kind of came about as a result of America becoming a distrustful culture - i.e., the Watergate scandal, coming on the heels of the Pentagon Papers and the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. I'm not going to sit here and say that the idea of distrusting authority as a whole (and the government in particular) came about solely because of the 1960s (which, I imagine, some might lead you to believe); what I will say is that if you're looking for a flashpoint, that's as good as any, and few events say more about why authority SHOULDN'T be trusted than Nixon's slow, painful slide into disgrace. The thing that should be noted about distrust of authority and the bringing of irony into our culture is that it's a genie that most definitely cannot be stuffed back into the bottle. And I would argue that's certainly a good thing; it's better that we don't go tripping into the world as a bunch of doe-eyed innocents who trust everybody in a position of power over us. But there's something kind of sad in that we can no longer be doe-eyed innocents (well, it's possible, but probably not recommended unless you're Amish or something), and that the ability to have that sort of unswerving faith in authority has been shattered forever.

I think about these things when I listen to "New Morning", a track that (from all appearances) seems to be unencumbered by irony on any level. Wikipedia's description calls it "wry", but even that seems somewhat unconvincing; when you're dealing with lyrics like "This must be the day that all of my dreams come true/So happy just to be alive/Underneath the sky of blue", the only way you can really call that "wry" is if you're actively trying to make it so. That is, I think, one of the things that can make this album somewhat difficult to deal with - Dylan, who you could argue was one of the most ironic and detached artists to ever live during the Electric Trilogy era, has put out an album with nearly no preconceptions, no hidden agendas, and no motives other than to be a collection of songs about where Dylan's head was at during this part of his life*. Even Nashville Skyline, an album where Bob had his heart imprinted directly on his sleeve, could be excused as a genre exercise (which, we can agree, is a little bit ironic), as this album could to some extent. But the actual lyrics?

I must confess that, to my modern ears, my love for this album does occasionally waver a bit when I mull over this particular conundrum. The songs are good, make no mistake...but is Bob really as invested as he seems to be (and as I'd like him to be, trusting soul that I am)? Should I be suspicious of just how soaring that chorus, all major chords, sweeping organ runs, and Bob leaping headfirst into one of his simplest and most memorable refrains, sounds blaring through my headphones? What am I to make of Bob singing about yet another pastoral setting, rooster's crowing and rabbits running and a freakin' groundhog, of all things, popping up? Do I trust my instincts and believe that Bob's really singing about something that he cares about, which makes the song a not half-bad pop ditty that manages to be just a little, teeny-weeny bit life-affirming? Or do I go with what some writers (and, IIRC, one or two commenters on this here blog) have suggested, that Bob was putting on a show for us rubes, either pretending or trying to convince himself that the country life was the one for him, probably not meaning it deep down inside?

You know what? I think I'm going to stick with my instincts here. There's too much unassuming joy here, in the (somewhat amateurishly, but whatever) picked acoustic solo to start the song, Dylan putting what sounds like his all into singing "so happy to just hear you smile", and that truly anthemic chorus, to simply discount or try to explain away. What the hell; sixties or no (yes, this is 1970, but you know what I mean), there was still room in the world for a paean to living the life of a quiet country gentleman without having to assume that it's a pile of bullshit. Hey, this whole "benefit of the doubt" thing is kinda cool. I should keep it up.

*well, there's "Day of the Locusts", but you could even argue that that's just Bob singing about his own insecurities, which is also a very direct thing to do, right?

Bob Dylan Song #150: If Dogs Run Free

2009-09-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

When I've talked about the "jazzy" side of New Morning, I'm usually thinking more about the distinctive piano playing style (compare and contrast with what he's doing on, say, "Ballad of a Thin Man"), the light band accompaniment throughout (never have I heard so many drum brushsticks played on a Dylan album before), and Dylan's loosest arrangements yet (see "Time Passes Slowly", which basically stops on a dime so Dylan can indulge his ivory-tickling side). That's not to say that all jazz can be described that way, just that in terms of how the album sounds, it's easier to use those sorts of comparisons than to suggest Dylan created some brand new genre out of whole cloth or something. And there's no better distillation of the mood of this album than "If Dogs Run Free", one of the few songs Dylan has ever written that could persuasively argued is its own island in his catalog. Sure, the song is in line with the jazz-based styling of much of this album, but none of those songs are so, well, outright jazz; we have scat singing in the background, Dylan banging away at the keys like a lounge singer with a brandy snifter on his piano for tips, a guitar playing random and aimless lines, and Dylan speak-singing his lyrics in the most casual way possible. It's really something else.

Now...does that actually make the song GOOD? That's a little harder to say. On the one hand, you really do want to give Bob points for trying; the song has the relaxed feel down cold, like Dylan really wanted to get some snaps of approval from the engineers after the take was laid down. And it's hard not to love the song's goofy, stoner-philosophy ramblings, one of those post-Electric Trilogy moments where Dylan just lets his mind wander and he babbles on about whatever pops in the ol' melon of his (quite frankly, I don't know how THIS song didn't end up in The Big Lebowski...oops, a little hand-tipping there). On the other, the scatting is more distracting than anything else, and the song might be a little too relaxed, more experiment than actual tune. Experiments are fine, but at a certain point you have to stick the tunes in there, or else you get the Panda Bear album*. "If Dogs Run Free" sorta wanders around the tune, like someone circling a mall parking lot on the final pre-Christmas weekend, but it never manages to pull into a space.

Kudos to Bob for trying, though. In the post for "Wigwam" I made mention of how you could see Dylan reaching for something really big and ambitious with the sprawl of Self Portrait, only for one reason or another it never quite came off. Well, here's the thing: this album actually DOES have effort behind it, and that's what helps put it an extra peg ahead. One of the lazier criticisms people will lob against jazz is that it's intrinsically lazy in its composition, that the free-form nature of the modal stuff Miles Davis helped usher in or even something like "If I Were A Bell" might as well have been put together in the studio 5 minutes before the tape started rolling. Not only this is incredibly simplistic, but rather insulting to guys like Gil Evans, who put together remarkable arrangements thanks to having good ears for what works and what doesn't. And I think that Dylan, both on this album proper and this song especially, had to have his good ears working if he wanted the whole thing to work. This is, after all, uncharted waters for him; if he didn't put in some work and give his arrangements at least a little structure (and I do mean "little" at times), the whole thing would fall apart. If you've heard bad jazz, you know what I mean.

"If Dogs Run Free" is not my favorite song on here, but it might be the most representative. Just like some of the best comedic improvisers get there from hours and hours of practice, a song this relaxed and this surface-level effortless had to have come from Bob using his songwriting instincts to patch together every seemingly aimless element of this tune and duct-tape it all together into something that, while not a classic, at least works. That was one of the great problems of the last album - he patched together a lot of shit there, too, but it just didn't work. Here, though, the arrangements hold together, the wandering goes into interesting (rather than soporific) areas, and many of the songs, at their core, are just straight-up good. Believe me, this album wouldn't have been as well-received as it was in 1970 just based on it not being Self Portrait - there had to be quality tracks for those critics to latch onto. And those quality tracks are there, make no mistake about it. And, for that, I think I'll give Dylan some snaps.

*I've said before that I'd rather take a year off the end of my life than hear Person Pitch again. That's rather harsh, in retrospect, but it's always aggravating when a band takes material that might make a pretty darn good EP and tries to stretch a whole album out of it. At a certain point, you realize you're just listening to fat that should've been trimmed. It's not pleasant.

Bob Dylan Song #149: Winterlude

2009-09-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

Eyolf Ostrem, curator of the astoundingly awesome Dylanchords website, has a nice little line in reference to "Winterlude", where he says the song "has this corny, guy-on-the-sleeve-of-Nashville-Skyline-ish, country dude thing going on". That, honestly, about sums it up. So that's the end of the post. Good night, everybody!

Okay, fine. The reason I really enjoyed reading this line is that you can take the reference to Nashville Skyline as either a compliment or an insult, depending entirely on how you feel about that particular album and the songwriting metier Bob indulged himself in while recording it. As ten posts previous to this one should attest, I like Bob's style on that album just fine; there are many, I'm sure, that disagree. But for those on my side, it would seem somewhat strange to enjoy a song like "Tell Me That It Isn't True" and not go for something like "Winterlude", which almost seems to revel in its droll waltz-like tempo, its moon-June rhymes (but then, of course you'd want to rhyme "Winterlude" with "dude", am I right?) and its peaceful imagery of ice skating rinks and cozying up by the fireplace. I'd already written about the domestic tranquility that Bob brings to this album, and here he basically takes that tranquility to its logical extreme, painting a picture like the kinds that made Norman Rockwell a rich man. That, I'm sure, will put people off.

I will admit that I do find the song a little slight at times, what with some of the more saccharine-sweet imagery ("go down to the chapel, then come back and cook up a meal"? When do the neighborhood carolers come by?) and goofy rhymes ("darlin'" with "quarrelin'" - actually, that's not all THAT bad) kind of grate a little bit. I freely admit that I give songs like these a little bit more leeway, simply because I like the tone of the album so much, but I do have my limits, and "Winterlude" brushes right up to the edge of them. The song, really, works best as part of setting that tone, with its tempo reminiscent of "To Ramona", the gentle backup singing, and Dylan painting those pictures right out of the 1950s we all imagine but probably didn't really exist in that way. It would sound out of place on most any other albums Bob's put out (even Nashville Skyline, really), but it sits just fine here, and that's a good thing.

We all know, I'm sure, that quote Dylan said about his songwriting style, the bit about having to learn to do consciously what he used to do unconsciously; I'm sure I've even quoted it somewhere on this blog. I think about it now because, were that actually true, I can see this song as part of that process, a process that Bob embarked on more or less non-stop for the four years between his neck break and the recording of this album. In those years, Bob goes from the left-field Americana of The Basement Tapes, to the spare mystical folk of John Wesley Harding, to the straight-up country of Nashville Skyline, to the quasi-Western balladry of Self Portrait, and then finally to the jazziness of this album; that sort of stylistic ping-ponging suggests a man trying to get a handle on where his music ought to be, now that it can no longer return to where it used to be (as, of course, it hasn't returned to since). I've been guilty of penning a few bits of doggerel myself, and while nothing is nearly as good as even "Winterlude" is, in this song I see some of what I used to do as a songwriter, grasping for easy rhymes and already built-in emotional imagery, relying on four chords to carry the day, letting sentiment inform my lyrics in occasionally embarrassing ways. It's kind of endearing to think about that and then hear this song, quite frankly.

One of the reasons this album gets overlooked so often, I think, is that you can hear that casting about more on this album than any other pre-1974, even more so than Self Portrait. At least that album was just throwing all sorts of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. Here, Bob knows what he's aiming for, he's got his arrangements down and the tone he wants for the album set...and there's something there nonetheless, something that can put people off if they're not in the mood to buy what Dylan's selling. It's funny to say about an album so gentle and unassuming, but it's really an album that needs to be played in a certain frame of mind, or else you're just not going to like it. I wouldn't even go as far to say that's an excuse to say to people that don't like the album no matter what; you can like what you like, obviously. But I find it funny that "Winterlude" shares at least one trait with Metallica's "One", a song that couldn't be more different musically - there's a time and place to listen to it, and if you ain't there, it's not gonna work.

Bob Dylan Song #148: Went To See The Gypsy

2009-09-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

One of the things I really like about New Morning is just how relaxed all the songs tend to sound. "Laid-back" is a positive quality that often proves both ephemeral and rather subjective - after all, one could call the previous album "laid-back", and it wouldn't really be a compliment. But with this album (subjectivity again), it feels like Dylan had captured the casual quality that he'd infused into his life after making his escape from the grind of being a full-time musician, with songs that speak to his more relaxed state of mind. Take this song, "Went To See The Gypsy" - the tempo isn't particularly fast, the guitar licks don't so much sting as add spice to the track, and the organ track isn't as powerful or intrusive as other organ tracks on Bob's songs. This song could have been overwhelmed by more instrumentation, or even an arrangement similar to something on Self Portrait, but in the capable hands of the New Morning band everything sounds pretty darn good. Lest you thought Dylan's arranging instincts were dulled on the last album, here's proof that they were still there and in fine form.

The generally held belief about this song is that it has something to do with Elvis Presley; I can't remember if Dylan ever talked about there being some sort of dream involving Elvis or something (he never did meet Elvis in real life), but that story has been sunk into the Dylan legend at some point. There are a few clues to this in the lyrics - "big hotel", "he did it in Las Vegas/and he can do it here", and so on. Dylan's denied it, but big whoop-whoop - I wouldn't be surprised if at one point or another he's denied that Slow Train Coming is an album about God. We all know about young Elston Gunn; actually writing something that pays some sort of tribute to his boyhood idol (even if it's actually referring to the Vegas-era, maximum excess Elvis) would make a lot of sense. And the reference to "that little Minnesota town", where young Bob heard all those rock-n-roll records, helps cements that idea.

Then again, can this really be said as paying any homage to Elvis? After all, the gypsy of the song (and the pretty dancing girl, surely meant to be an embodiment of temptation) basically says two lines and disappears when the narrator goes looking for him again. That dancing girl told the narrator that the gypsy could do all these amazing things, and yet at the end that narrator finds himself back in his small town up North, just staring at the sun rising up, a banal image that manages to be infused with so much poetry. I bet I'm not the first person that thought about the Bob of Greenwich Village, making the move from rock rebel in leather jacket to folk hero in work shirt and blue jeans, perhaps seeing those rockers he idolized as myth, something that fades away if you look too closely, and the lives of those in those small towns (the subject of so many folk songs) as something real and tangible. It's kind of a bittersweet image, something akin to what it's like to grow up and realize that what you held true as a youth turns out to be something entirely different as you grow older.

This is, of course, something we all can sympathize with. If there is one lesson that adulthood (and many of our finest entertainments, from Mad Men to The Replacements' "Unsatisfied") has taught us, it's that the great big wide world we were promised as youngsters somehow manages to become smaller, pettier, and far less satisfying as we grow and mature. I know that's oversimplifying things, and that for many people (including myself, lest you think I'm already some muttering old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn) you can find all sorts of ways to be happy, or at least content, with a life that you could not have imagined ever wanting ten or even five years ago. And yet there is always that vague feeling in the pit of my stomach, this notion that somehow things got turned around and scrambled somewhere down the line, and that I probably missed the boat on something that would've changed my life and brought me infinite joy, but I never even knew that boat existed. I cannot be the only person that has felt this way. I know this is a downer, and I apologize.

I can't help wondering, as I listen to the song again, if that interpretation of "Went To See The Gypsy" is really true and Bob was really thinking about that moment in his life where, after all that zigging, he decided that he wanted to zag instead. Maybe, as he penned the lyrics, there was a slight rueful smile on his face, as he thought about the baby-faced, early-twenties version of himself, wondering where that gypsy went and if it wasn't better to turn away from pretty girls in Vegas (so to speak) and sing about what he saw in front of his own eyes, whether it was the sun rising over Hibbing, a girl he wished he could've brought to Italy, or the injustices of a world that promises so much and so rarely delivers. Of course, things turned out far more complicated than that, and it would not be long before the work shirts were placed in mothballs and the leather jacket pulled out to be worn once again. And that is why Bob is who he is - he surely had the same fears as I have, and he surely felt at some point that he'd missed a boat somewhere...and then he just got on another boat and sailed to where he wanted to sail. One day, if I'm lucky, I'll be able to do that as well.

Bob Dylan Song #147: Time Passes Slowly

2009-09-09T08:12:00.000-07:00

Of all the left-field choices that ended up on Biograph (still the gold standard of albums that make an attempt to do a career retrospective of the man; the fact that it hasn't been bettered 20 years later is kinda sad, if you ask me), "Time Passes Slowly" might take the crown. And that's nothing to say about the quality of the song; it's just that valuable real estate on this box set is being held by a two and a half minute pop (well, pop-ish) number on one of Dylan's lesser-known albums. Then again, one could easily argue that this is what makes Biograph so damn great - there's any number of more well-known nuggets that could've made it on the album, and yet we get a fine piece of work from, yes, one of Dylan's lesser-known albums, sitting proudly in between "I Believe in You" (one of Dylan's best Christian-era numbers) and "I Shall Be Released" (which needs no explanation). And where Biograph is arguably at its best is when it showcases stuff we might never have heard, like "I'll Keep it With Mine" or something from the New York sessions for Blood on the Tracks, as well as that lesser-known stuff. We can hear "Like A Rolling Stone" any old time - why not shine a spotlight on something different?

And "Time Passes Slowly" is certainly something different. A long while back, writing about "Queen Jane Approximately", I wrote a little bit about Bob Dylan's piano work on Highway 61 Revisited. Well, his piano playing on that album sounds primitive compared to the glorious work Bob unleashed on this album, and most particularly on this song. Dylanchords proprietor Eyolf Ostrem, in his tablature for this song, mentions a "short, glorious piano break" right after the second verse, and he's absolutely right on the money. Seemingly out of nowhere, acting as a counterpoint to the skronky 70s-style guitar solos that have been splashed all over this song, Dylan plays an understated, yet absolutely marvelous few bars that don't so much show off Dylan's talents as let us know that he does, indeed, HAVE talents. It's really something you should at least hear once - and hey, maybe that answered the question I posed above, as to how this made it onto that supposedly definitive retrospective. Bob isn't above showing off a little, is he?

While I'm thinking about showing off, it's pretty interesting to listen to the song and see what kind of subject matter was on Bob's mind at this time. I've written a lot about the 1960s in this blog series (perhaps far more than I should have), but one thing that might not have been mentioned here is just how much actually happened within those ten years. Now, obviously, a lot of stuff happens in EVERY decade, but it's astonishing to imagine that three game-changing Presidential elections, a gut-wrenching string of assassinations, the emergence of a potent counter-culture, a rift opening between Nixon's "silent majority" and, well, everybody else, and a general shift in the way that people viewed the world all happened in those years. If ever a band could encapsulate the era they came from, it was The Beatles, who essentially packed their entire recording career into seven years, changing not just the record industry, but the entire entertainment industry, in their wake. It seemed like you couldn't open the paper without reading about at least one thing that unalterably changed the world.

And what's Bob singing about in "Time Passes Slowly"? Lazy days in the mountains, searching for a honey to call his own, and how our lives, so finite in the big picture, tend to move so slowly along from day to day (have you ever had an hour, say, at the airport, with nothing to do? It can be goddamn interminable, can't it?). You could suggest that Bob was out of touch in those days, living up in Woodstock and baking bread with his kids or whatever; that couldn't possibly be true, but whatever. The point is that he seems to be reveling in that lifestyle he'd created for himself, separated from a world changing so fast few people could properly keep up, content to gaze at the stars, "lost in a dream", "no reason to go anywhere" (these are quotes from the song, of course), quietly sitting in a self-created bubble. There are probably a few of us for whom that sounds pretty nice. And it certainly seemed pretty nice for Bob in those days - which is why he chose to write about it, I assume.

I suppose you could also take the tack that Bob might be taking a more wry take on this sort of thing (as has been suggested about the album's title track). After all, some of the lyrics could be considered a droll parody ("we sat in the kitchen while her mama was cookin'"? Really?), and Bob's never been above a wink to his audience, or even just to himself. But I like to think that he was straight-faced here (as, also, in the title track), and that he was content with where he was in life. We know that the reverie wouldn't last and Bob would find himself stepping back in the real world, so it's pretty neat to hear him lost in that bubble, waiting for what the next day would bring in his cozy secluded home.

Bob Dylan Song #146: Day of the Locusts

2009-09-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

Author's note: the blog title links directly to a post about "Day of the Locusts", Obama, marijuana, and the trouble with online town halls. Give it a read, won't you?

For a guy like me writing a project like this, actually having a story built in to the story makes things a little bit easier; thus, I find myself having to thank Bob for a song actually written about something that happened in his real life. For those that don't know, in June of 1970 Bob was invited to Princeton University to be given an honorary doctorate. Still technically in his twenties at this point (you tend to associate honorary doctorates with older folk - at least, I do), and not exactly comfortable with The Man as it is, Bob had a host of reservations about accepting the award. It was only upon the urging of his wife and David Crosby (and, apparently, one of Crosby's joints - Almost Famous has a great deleted scene about the wonders of "Crosby pot") that Bob got himself to the ceremony, accepted the degree, and then got the hell out of there. And, as a result, we got this song, one of the snarkier and more cynical of Dylan's wilderness years.

Apparently during this ceremony there was a cicada infestation in Princeton (nasty little bastards, those cicadas are - I went through two iterations while living on the East Coast, and they are horrible insects), which is where the "locusts" of Bob's title comes from. Locusts, as well, are really terrible little bastards (there's a reason there was a plague of locusts visited upon the Egyptians and not, like, a plague of butterflies), and one can only assume that Dylan did not mean for the locusts making noise for him to be any sort of compliment. You could probably even imagine Bob, stoned out of his gourd and distinctly uncomfortable wearing a robe and mortarboard, smiling a dry little smile to himself as he saw those insects crawling all over the campus. If nothing else, it's probably as fitting an image as he himself could have conceived.

As an actual song, it's one of the most fun on New Morning proper, with Dylan and old friend/teller of tall tales Al Kooper combining with electric piano for the verses and a powerful organ on the chorus to tremendous effect, as well as an up-tempo arrangement that practically charges with energy, matching Dylan's wicked lyrics. It would take somebody with Dylan's temperament to see what many consider a massive privilege and instead find himself imagining a tomb-like atmosphere, dead quiet, something out of Scanners, and Bob himself making a Bonnie and Clyde-like getaway with his sweetheart in tow. And, as you might expect, it's pretty darn funny, as well; one kind of wishes he'd been able to write about that Tom Paine dinner the same way he wrote about this, so that there wouldn't have been such a stupid fuss about the whole thing. This is one of the few songs in the wilderness years that make me think of Electric Trilogy Bob, not so much in the lyrics as in the droll sense of humor Bob's always had.

It should be noted, for the record, that a song like this also stands apart because it seems to run contrary to where Bob was at this point of both his life and his career. As will be mentioned in the "Sign on the Window" post (no, I'm not contractually obligated to mention it every post I make for this album - I have a good reason here), Bob appears to have carved out a new niche for himself as a family man and a quiet retiree (of sorts), something that most of his audience would probably have a pretty big problem with during that time. And, from all appearances during that time, Dylan was trying his damndest to live up to that niche. If any of you have seen the photos of Bob up in Woodstock during this time of his life, you'd have seen a man with a thin beard and reading glasses, messing around with his children, or reading a book somewhere, or strolling down some pathway in the forest around his property. In other words, you'd see a man who nobody in their right mind would've guessed was some kind of Spokesman for a Generation (much like nobody would've guessed that present-day Henry Winkler was the same man as the Henry Winkler who played Arthur Fonzarelli). Bob worked pretty hard to reach that place in 1970, and you could hardly blame him for being proud of it.

With all that said, it's both refreshing and even a little reassuring to hear Bob singing about how what many people would consider a great honor was, instead, both a massive pain in the ass and something that made him distinctly uncomfortable. You can change a lot about who you are as a person if you try hard enough, but it's damn near impossible to change who you are at your core. And who Bob Dylan is at his core is a man that can't help but Question Authority (as the button once said), doesn't feel comfortable in high society, and doesn't want a title pinned neatly to the front of his shirt. In other words, he's the Bob that so many people fell in love with during the mid-60s, and continue to fall in love with today. And that Bob showed himself under the layers of gentle smiles and country-man peacefulness in "Day of the Locusts", still uncomfortable with a label, ill at ease with something the general public would be happy to receive. Just knowing that that Bob is still there must have been quite a relief in those days.

Bob Dylan Song #145: If Not For You

2009-09-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

(1)

On June 8th, 1970, Self Portrait was released to a disbelieving, astounded, and even totally pissed off listening audience. On July 23rd, just over six weeks later, the infamous Rolling Stone review of that album hit the newsstands. And, to the general surprise and almost relieved joy of said listening audience, on October 19th of that year New Morning began appearing on record store shelves. Just for the record, I'm certainly not in the camp that believes New Morning came out so soon to stem the critical beating Bob was taking in the wake of the disaster he'd just released (and I'm DEFINITELY not suggesting it had anything to do with the RS review - I may be crazy, but not that crazy), no matter how many people have suggested that that was the reason for the quick release. I find it more akin to when Radiohead released Kid A and Amnesiac, two stylistically similar albums, within eight months of each other. And it's not as though Bob had never done this before - maybe not within that short a time, but Dylan did release four acoustic albums basically within the span of two years, after all. It's just worth noting how short that time period was; the teapot-sized tempest surrounding Self Portrait didn't have any time to really get going before Dylan snuffed it out with an album that essentially serves as the Gallant to that anti-opus's Goofus.

In fact, the closest stylistic link to this album would in fact be the one that immediately precedes it - there is, after all, a preponderance of backup singers, mellow arrangements, and a laid-back feeling all throughout. However, we have two rather significant differences here, which help explain the latter album's enhanced reputation. The first, at least in my opinion, is that there's a jazzier feel to this album, the arrangements owing more to that particular free-form genre than to the blues, and parodoxically (at least, considering Dylan's blues knowledge, even at that young age) Dylan manages to do better with that style of music and this set of songs. The other difference, of course, is that there are better songs here. Funny how that works, no?

It says a great deal about the puckish nature of our man Bob that he would devote a chapter of the first (and, one can only hope, not last) volume of his own autobiography series to this album, one that has its share of cult follower appeal but is by no means a major work in his catalog, over any number of more famous masterpieces in his career. It also says a great deal that the actual telling of the circumstances of the album, with some of the songs being written for a musical that Bob would end up quitting after a few months, is pretty damn interesting - then again, any information about the wilderness years, with Bob mentioning a certain number of people he'd like to stick in his own personal Room 101, would probably be of a great deal of interest. And then there's the contentious nature of the sessions, which took place as the world reacted with scorn and shock over Self Portrait, and Bob found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to follow (horrors!) a bad album, or at least a critically disliked album (or, in this case, both). Under the circumstances, with the pressure on and all sorts of people beating on his door, it seems entirely remarkable that Dylan was able to record at all, let alone record an album, a wealth of outtakes, and a treasure trove of cover versions that could very well have made a second (and maybe better) Self Portrait. And that resulting album is GOOD? My stars.

Now, just HOW good this album is, that's a topic of debate. There are those that consider it Bob's lost masterpiece, the classic nobody talks about but really should. There are those that think it's really not that great, and only benefits from a halo reputation based on not being That Album. And then there's just about everybody else, that thinks the album has its merits, its weak points, but in the end is certainly worth the 36 minutes it takes to spin from front to back. I happen to fall in that third class, as you'd probably expect, but leaning a bit more towards the first - songs like "One More Weekend" and "Sign on the Window" (ESPECIALLY "Sign on the Window" - if ever there was a song that needs the "The Man In Me" treatment, it's that one) give the album an extra edge when debating the second tier of Bob's great long players. And the best thing about the album, especially in the wake of his last album, is that it holds together marvelously; a unified set of good songs will almost always get the edge over a disjointed set with some classics and some stinkers. In the end, New Morning is an album that probably deserves a critical reappraisal, and I hope one day it gets it.

The last thing that should be mentioned about this album is that, in many ways, it closes the book on the initial era of Dylan's career. In the obvious sense, it's the last official Dylan album* for three years, a pretty darn long time in the context of his career (hell, Bob put out an album just over a year after he BROKE HIS NECK), and when Bob returned he was practically a classic rock artist, something that would dog him through Tour '74 and would only dissipate when he bucked that title with his absolute masterpiece and the most vital live work of his career. In a more theoretical sense, New Morning is where we stop thinking of Young Bob, the counter-cultural Voice of the Sixties, the Man of Myth and Legend. When Bob Dylan would finally re-emerge from his self-imposed "slumber", it would be as Older Bob, the Middle-Aged, Wiser Man of the Seventies, not as out-there as he used to be, but just as capable of creating amazing music. In a sense, it's like pre-retirement and post-retirement Michael Jordan - the amazing basketball player with the highlight-reel dunks and boundless athleticism replaced by a smarter player with less hop in his legs but a bottomless well of tricks and skills that put him on a level above everybody else. And, with that in mind, New Morning takes on an even more nostalgic quality, as the Bob Dylan the 60s knew and loved gracefully exited, stage left. The king is dead. Long live the king.

(2)

It should be noted, then, that we actually kick things off on New Morning with what might be considered something of an inauspicious start, with my personal "wait, this is considered a classic?" song, "If Not For You". This is not to say that I don't like "If Not For You" (we'll get to my complaints in a moment), just that I don't hold it in quite the same regard as, say, George Harrison did. As a way of getting into this song, one thing I didn't mention in the introduction is a second dichotomy that links this album with its predecessor, one that Greil Marcus mentioned in the RS review (mentions of that will be much rarer now, I can assure you). He refers, as you no doubt remember, to Self Portrait as "such a...friendly album", which was also no doubt supposed to be a bad thing. Given how well Dylan tends to do unfriendly, and given that the idea of Dylan with a smile on his face was still relatively unsettling at the time, maybe it was, who knows.

Well, here's the kicker - New Morning is easily as friendly, if not even more so, than Self Portrait could ever claim to be. Just take this very first song - from the bouncy, electric piano-laden, casual guitar lick driven arrangement, to those moon-June rhymes as Bob declares his undying love to some anonymous person (the "and you know it's true" is a particularly nice touch), you have a song that's almost impossible not to love. It's almost like Dylan's version of an adorable dog that you can't help but want to pet; it makes no other intimations than to be a nice, poppy little song, and to think of it as anything else would be entirely disingenuous. Trying to pick some sort of deeper meaning out of this song is both fruitless and besides the point. It's a fun song. Bob's certainly allowed his share.

Where my problems with the song lie, then, is in that very arrangement that Bob ended up using for the official version. This is obviously a matter of preference arising here, but I consider myself a much bigger fan of the take that made it onto the first Bootleg Series, with George Harrison riding shotgun. Taken at a slower tempo, with a nifty little slide guitar arrangement cropping up between the verses and Bob chiming in with some always-welcome harmonica, this particular version (which Harrison would end up utilizing for his own version of "If Not For You") gives the song a more laid-back feel, one that might not have worked quite as well in the context of the rest of the album, but one that suits the song far more than the bouncy, yet slightly jumpy official arrangement. Dylan, for whatever reason, ended up scrapping that take (perhaps it was never meant to see official release - maybe it was meant as guideline for Harrison's eventual version), and going with one that has its own merits but seems distinctly inferior. Ah well, that's just me.

Inauspicious start or no, I still believe that Dylan could not have chosen a better way to kick things off for this album than "If Not For You". Even with the simplistic lyrics, it's still miles ahead of anything on Self Portrait; it'd have to be pretty hard not to be an improvement in that department (although I'd argue "All The Tired Horses" is the better song...). But what's most important is that Bob established right off the bat that while he was still the Bob with a smile on his face (well, until "Day of the Locusts" turns that smile into a sneer), this was a Bob with a stronger focus behind that smile, one that was eager to remind us that he could still write songs with vitality, songs that had life to them. It's not the greatest possible return to form, but it is a return to form all the same, and a welcome one indeed.

*note: that rationale is why I'm going to leave the 1973 album Dylan be. It may be in print thanks to iTunes (those bastards!), but let's not forget that it was only released by Columbia Records as a big middle finger to the recently departed Bob, and I don't think that makes it worthy of this little project. My apologies to those hoping to read my thoughts on "Big Yellow Taxi".

Bob Dylan Song #144: Alberta #2

2009-09-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

And so, here we are, the end of the road that is Self Portrait, and we manage to end with a song that's both a fitting closer and one heck of an anti-climax. Perhaps those aren't even contradicting terms. It seems to make sense that this album would end with "Alberta #2", essentially a cover of another song on the same damn album, and a song as good as any to put this sucker to bed. As far as the song goes, it's probably the better "Alberta" - the song's structure is more suitable to an up-tempo arrangement, and Bob at least puts on a pretty good effort here. Of course, nearly any song would serve as something as an anti-climax for an ending to this album (with the possible exception of "Wigwam", which instead serves at the penultimate track as a final bit of perversion from our man Bob), so perhaps it's not worth worrying too hard about. At any rate, in true nature with the rest of the album, it's a pleasant few minutes that shows up, does its bit, and then abruptly comes to a close. And, anti-climax that this song is aside, there might not be a more fitting real ending than that tape screeching to a halt, like somebody stopped the reel too soon and nobody bothered to correct it. I kind of like that.

The final topic the RS review mentions, one so apparently important that it gets two whole sections, is the notion of Self Portrait serving as Dylan's version of the auteur theory, one which was catching hold as the 1960s progressed and the French New Wave had helped redefine what film could aspire to be. Seeing as how this collection of motley tunes has been named in a way that you can't help but immediately fix onto the man himself, one could easily infer that this album is in fact ABOUT the man himself, capturing the mannerisms, quirks, and all the little things that make Bob Dylan Bob Dylan. And, for those that subscribe to the auteur theory as something good and worthwhile, and want their art to bear the unmistakeable stamp of its creator and even act as part of the overall arc of said artist developing in his craft, this is a really, really good thing. Marcus, rather obviously, disagrees - he finds the idea of somebody wilding out over Dylan covering a bunch of other people's songs vapid, and it's hard to disagree.

Marcus also brings up the idea that approaching your craft as an auteur would is limiting in an artistic sense - that by imposing yourself upon everything you create, you and your works become more insular, self-contained, and this method of making art ultimately will collapse on itself. I'd like to point out that Emily Dickinson seemed to do just fine in that regard, but that's surely an exception, so we'll take Marcus at his word. And this is the sort of thing that can work both ways - both negatively, as Marcus would have it, but more positively than he'd give it credit for. Marcus is correct in saying that this insular way of dealing with the world can limit ambition, perhaps even stifle it entirely, and art tends to be better when it takes on the world and you don't have to play an endless guessing game as to which song has to do with which incident in the artist's life and what the artist was feeling at this particular time (which, of course, is practically unavoidable with Dylan, but we can agree that that's not the best way to listen to his music). Allowing his music to be overwhelmed with his own fame is the worst thing that could happen to Dylan, and an album like Self Portrait, constructed in a way that practically invites guessing games while not being strong enough to stand on its own merits, would get swallowed in a second. Not being a seer, of course, Marcus certainly had his reasons to worry.

And yet...I suppose I am already stepping on an entire series of future posts, but I cannot help but look five years into Bob's future, to find an album that would very clearly fall under the auteur theory that Marcus described, and yet is so powerful and brilliant that it dismisses any mere criticism like "oh, this is too much about Bob" with a wave of its hand. Now, obviously, it does not hurt to have a collection of astounding songs in your back pocket to help push aside those charges of navel-gazing, as Blood on the Tracks does. But what we're dealing with in that album is a song cycle that surely has everything to do with the artist that created it (despite his past claims to the contrary - I mean, come on, dude), that doesn't so much take on the world as shape the world into a stage for this little ten-act play Dylan has written, and has led to guessing games for well over 30 years (I don't think ANYBODY has still gotten a hold of what "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts" is all about) - basically, then, Dylan's own version of Stolen Kisses. And it is an unqualified masterpiece. Surely, then, it's not just the pen, but how you wield it.

I don't think that Marcus was arguing, in the end, that an artist shouldn't be able to stamp ANY imprimatur unique only to them on their own work; after all, so much of what gives art its personality comes from he or she that created it. But what he was saying, and with regards to this album, is that when you stamp too much of yourself onto your work, you're running down a rabbit hole that only leads further and further down. And in those days, when nobody knew what Dylan was capable next, only that he'd released this disheartening collection of a few jewels buried under a mountain of slop, you could be forgiven if you saw Dylan chasing down his own personal rabbit hole, maybe never to be seen again. Thankfully, we know how that story ended. Bob came back from the depths of his own navel, recorded some of the greatest music we or our future generations will ever see, and proved every person writing his premature career obituary totally wrong. And, ultimately, that's what makes Self Portrait such a tough listening experience today - it brings us back to those dark times, when Dylan might have been lost to a lifetime of desultory covers and increasingly painful originals. We may know how the story ends, but that doesn't make me want to go through that story just to read the end all over again.

And that's it for Self Portrait! Whew. Coming up next - good music! No more using somebody else's words as a crutch! Thank you all so much for the reading and support; we're entering a new decade of Dylan's career, and a whole new spectrum of ideas to write about. I, for one, simply cannot wait.

Bob Dylan Song #143: Wigwam

2009-09-03T20:43:00.001-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

I'm going to be completely honest - I'd wanted to spend a chunk of this post talking about how Wes Anderson used "Wigwam", a goofy instrumental that sounds like Bob recorded it after a night of tequila and cigars, to surprisingly emotional effect in his masterpiece The Royal Tenenbaums. However, two separate things stopped me from doing so. The first is seemingly obvious - with time running out on this album, there's much bigger fish to fry in terms of stuff to talk about, and it might not be prudent for me to take up valuable real estate talking about how much I like that film. The other reason, equally obvious, is that I could very well talk about the topic of movies and music linking together not too long from now, in a more appropriate setting (no points for guessing what that future post might be). So, with that in mind, I'll have to think of something else to say here.

What I do think bears mentioning is that this song is pretty hard not to like - I mean, granted, it's kinda dumb and kinda wacky (not in a good way) and is just about the worst possible (or maybe best possible?) "centerpiece" for this album. On the other hand, it doesn't try to be anything that it's not, and basically acts as the musical equivalent of extending a warm handshake with a big smile on your face. That sort of refreshing directness is the sort of thing you don't get in Dylan's career in general, and only in fits and starts on this album in particular, and is a welcome sound as the album finally winds its way to its end (it's over 60 minutes, you know; think of that!). And the horn section, managing both to be a grand brass arrangement and a remarkable parody of a grand brass arrangement, is the sort of musical touch that you easily wish Dylan had made more use of throughout this album. The best thing that I can say about this song is that it probably sounds best if you're outside on your porch, cooler full of beer on ice, staring at a really gorgeous sunset. That's a pretty darn good thing to say about a song, don't you think?

Now, then. The RS review, having winded its way through all sorts of crap, saves its two most interesting topics for last. The first topic, labeled "vocation as a vocation" (I always figured at least one of those was a "vacation"; it's hard to believe that it's not), discusses the prospect of Dylan having a calling and the consequences of if he decides to live up to it or not. That vocation, of course, is being a writer and performer of music, but Marcus has chosen to mix that in with a possible new vocation, as seen through the kaleidoscope of this album - Dylan as keeper of the spirit of our country. Marcus suggests, not without reason, that Dylan may have been reaching for it on this album, with its odd collection of folk songs, country music, blues, and Dylan's own particular brand of American music (filtered through his own country phase, country music being one of the most truly American forms of music that exist). But thanks to the overall half-assedness of the whole enterprise, Dylan displaying both considerable ambition and the lack of ability or desire to take that ambition to its natural conclusion, an opportunity has slipped both through his and our fingers. Instead, we're left with a man that (quoting Marcus - maybe my favorite and surely the most interesting bit of this review) is "hardly a prophet, merely a man with good vision".

It bears asking what, exactly, is wrong with having that good vision; it surely beats having no vision and not even seeing the zeitgeist, let alone having any part of shaping it. Where I think Marcus does have a point, though, is that you can hear the makings of something very special on this album, only to be tamped down by sugary sweetness and general lack of any spark. I find myself yet again having to assuage the readers of this blog that I don't hate Self Portrait, not nearly as much as I constantly find myself bored and disappointed by it. But it's only thinking about this idea of Dylan finding a calling for himself as a keeper of the red/white/blue flame that I actually, just a teeny tiny bit, find myself resenting Bob for recording this album. It's surely not Dylan's responsibility to BE that keeper of the flame, of course...and yet you hear some of the blues stuff that works, the left-field cinematic grandeur of "All The Tired Horses", the remarkable takes of "Copper Kettle" and "Living The Blues", and all the ways that Dylan showed he knew his shit w/r/t music before he was ever given a radio show to prove it, and, well, I don't know. You can make too much of anything if you want to, but if you don't make too much of anything, there's no point in caring about anything, now is there?

The funny thing is that, as he reaches the twilight of his career, Dylan has become that very keeper of the American flame Marcus had hoped he could be way back in 1970. Ever since the recording of those mid-90s folk albums, Dylan has taken just about every opportunity to integrate as many strains of the music he's loved his whole life into his albums, from the white-hot rumble of "Rollin' & Tumblin'" to the shimmy and shake of "If You Ever Go To Houston" to the almost indescribably gorgeous Apocalyptic vision of "High Water (For Charley Patton)", a four-minute tour of Bob's blues record collection scored to that amazing banjo track. And somehow, nearing his eighth decade, Dylan has managed to become even more an American figure than he ever has, shrouding himself in the past and eluding any attempt to understand what he's on about. Maybe all Dylan needed to reach that vocation was just a little more time. Either way, you can put together enough tracks from the last twenty-odd years to create that Western Marcus had seen Dylan nearly writing with Self Portrait. And that Western would be every bit the equal of The Wild Bunch, that is for certain.

Bob Dylan Song #142: It Hurts Me Too

2009-09-01T08:42:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

As we finally begin to wind down this massive album (forget law school; I feel like I started this damn thing somewhere during my undergraduate studies), I find myself welcoming a song like "It Hurts Me Too" with open arms. It's not particularly great or anything - Dylan basically gives a bluesy, stripped-back rendition of a song that is probably as old then as Bob is now, claiming the track for himself (as is his wont - more on that in a second) while not doing too much to overwhelm the tune. What makes it a more fun listening experience, then, is that it's stripped-back, a more cozy listening experience than the Disney-fied takes on some (hell, most) of the songs on here, a bit of an oasis from all the puffery and what have you that makes up this weird, weird album. It probably says a lot that all I'm really asking for at this point is three minutes of innocuous, pleasant blues, but that's where I am right now. There's the pleasant I've had to get used to, and this kind of pleasant, and I prefer this kind of pleasant.

When talking about "It Hurts Me Too", the RS review brings up Dylan's legacy of occasionally pilfering songs, some from the public domain, others from more well-known tunes, and turning them into his own. This is, as longer-time readers of this blog will know, something that I've touched on a few times (usually to the effect of me getting torn a new one - such is life). One can be thankful that it's become rather a dead issue, something that has more academic value than anything else. I think, at this point in our lives, we can forgive Dylan for his occasional (some might say "more often than necessary") nicking of older songs and recasting in his own vein. After all, Dylan has certainly built up enough goodwill over these many years that when he finds himself in a controversy (such as the Love and Theft/Confessions of a Yakuza imbroglio) most of us are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Then again, we're talking about 1970 here, only a decade into Bob's career, when the topic is undoubtedly fresher (I kind of envy the RS crew, being able to write about this godforsaken album without the weight of 40 extra years of amateur sleuths - cough - taking a stab at figuring it out) and the wounds a little fresher as well. The RS review takes a nasty jab at Bob, suggesting that with all the songs Bob claims as his own on Self Portrait, Bob'll make a few extra shekels and "thousands of people will get a phony view of their own history". That might be a tad overblown, but certainly still a point to consider. Dylan has already had enough barbs flung at him at this point, what with the theft of folk melodies and his numerous career choices and what have you (I'm reminded of that Oscar Wilde quote, for some reason...), and the notion of Bob co-opting a genre of music for his own means is a worrisome prospect indeed.

Which, then, brings up maybe the one avenue of this damned album I haven't gone down yet - what the hell is up with Bob putting his name to so many of the songs that are clearly not his? The whole Self Portrait thing is a horse that's been well-beaten to death, so I'll try to leave that aside as much as I can. But the idea that Bob stuck his name on many of these songs (as the RS review intimates - "plagiarism" is a nasty charge to throw out there) does give us pause - you have to wonder, amongst other things, why Bob would go through the trouble when there were plenty of people that would say "what did you have to do with writing 'Belle Isle', exactly?", or what Dylan would actually gain from suggesting he might've had something to do with a well-known blues song that may very well have been written when Bob was still in footy pajamas. And the more I think about it, the more I find myself playing devil's advocate (as I often do), imagining that Bob might have been winking at us, or just outright saying "yeah, I've nicked some stuff before - deal with it", or something like that. I hate it when things don't make sense, and there's a lot about this album that doesn't.

As you might very well imagine, I'm glad that these series of posts are coming to an end, so that I can write about songs that are a) good, and b) don't have such an oppressive weight hanging over them. But I can't help but finding myself a little wistful, at the same time. Don't worry, I haven't lost my marbles (yet); it's more the idea that I won't be dealing with the history of Bob in quite the same way ever again. I'll be writing about classic albums, including one candidate for the greatest album ever recorded (certainly the greatest album about lost love ever recorded), I'll be writing about terrible albums (including one or two that might actually top this one for sheer awfulness), and I'll be writing about mediocre albums (it'll be fun to see which ones end up falling in that camp, considering it's been years since I've given a few of them a spin). But I can pretty much guarantee that I won't be writing about an album with THIS much baggage attached to it, one with as many talking points as the health care debate, and one that has confounded and even outright angered listeners for damn near four decades. That's something special. It's a pretty crappy world to immerse yourself in, but it's easy to immerse yourself all the same.

Bob Dylan Song #141: Take A Message To Mary

2009-08-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

There's something kind of amusing and ironic, in my opinion, that what could be easily construed as the most depressing song on this album boasts arguably the album's most energetic arrangement. Those of you that know the Everly Brothers arrangement (a more gentle, acoustic-based affair, as proven by this amusing video - ah, the 50's) might be surprised to hear the tempo sped up, the backup singers in full voice, and a more driving rhythm section than, perhaps, the song demands. You probably won't be too surprised, though, to hear Dylan utilizing his country croon for the song - seeing as how the Everlys put their own stamp on the song (courtesy of Felice & Boudleaux Bryant, writers of "Bye Bye Love" and "All I Have To Do Is Dream", amongst others), Dylan probably felt it more prudent to use the voice you'd probably more associate with "singing" for him. It's probably a wise choice, in the context of this particular song, at least.

It is, perhaps, that combination of Dylan's country voice and the relatively peppy arrangement that makes this song stand out; it might not stand out in the sense that it's good, per se (as noted above, the song should probably lope along, given its subject matter - bringing it out to a trot might not be the best idea), but it's certainly different. Think of the more up-tempo songs on this album - you've got "Little Sadie", the Isle of Wight tracks, and that's basically it. Now, we're not talking Ramones or Slayer fast here; it's really all about degrees on this album. But when you're listening to the aural equivalent of a nice bowl of vanilla pudding, a bowl of vanilla pudding with some raisins in it is going to flip your metaphorical wig. Here, then, is one of those raisins. It's fun to listen to once or twice, that much is certain, and given how some of the songs on here don't even reach that damning-with-faint-praise status, I suppose that's a real compliment indeed.

A few days ago, I was flipping through (I think) Mojo magazine, which had dedicated a significant chunk of space to The Beatles on the eve of the major album remastering project (which I will be buying into, rube that I am). One of the articles therein talked about some of the lesser known accomplishments of the group, and the one that I'm remembering (you'll see why in a second) is "they killed Tin Pan Alley". What that means, in so many words, is that the group (by favoring their own compositions over that of professional songwriters - IIRC, A Hard Day's Night was the first album released by a group that contained only their own songs) brought an end to the system of popular artists recording music churned out in songwriting factories, helping to make it possible for singer-songwriters to emerge and bringing some much-needed grit into the world of popular music. In fact, our man Bob was brought up as a key example of this - who knows how his career would've turned out if he'd been forced into the role of mere songwriter, writing "Boots of Spanish Leather" for some cat with a better voice but lesser soul to put their grubby mitts on it? In that sense, we're all better off for the Beatles taking the fate of American popular music out of the hands of guys in ties and handing it to the musicians themselves.

Now, obviously there's nothing bad that can be said about that - you could certainly make a case that indie music might never have existed without a market for music recorded by their writers, and everybody from Tom Waits to Joanna Newsom owe their livelihoods to that. But I think that there's a flipside to this coin, one that we might not care too much about today but still deserves some consideration. This is about the most obvious example I could care to think of, but I look at the career of one Elvis Aron Presley, a musician who achieved everlasting fame by recording the songs of other people. Now, while Elvis may have a few songwriting credits to his name, we can be reasonably certain that he really didn't do much in that regard, and any actual songs he may have written probably wouldn't have been much of anything. So we have a career entirely based on songs not by Elvis - and we can agree, I would hope, that his vast catalog contains enough legitimate classics to justify its existence. And does anybody complain about a lack of emotion and soul in "Suspicious Minds" or "Can't Help Falling In Love"? Of course not. Like any good recorder of covers (one might say, if they're in a wry mood, that Elvis' entire career is that of covers, like a one-man Me First & The Gimme Gimmes or something), Elvis managed to make songs that weren't his own, well, his own, simply because he had that special something that allowed him to do so. And he wouldn't have had the chance without great professional songwriters to help him along. That, I think, deserves some consideration.

It's certainly true that modern professional songwriting is often not much to think about, and that for every "Since U Been Gone"s we get a truckload of whatever stuff Jordin Sparks has committed to plastic. And I'm not suggesting that "American Idol" is a particular good thing in any way, shape, or form. But I do believe that we have a place in our music-listening lives for professional songwriters like the Tin Pan Alley denizens of old, and that perhaps one day we can have artists that cross over the increasingly splintering divides in popular music, somebody who can satisfy those people that like a catchy tune while rendering the credibility issues that most indie fans would quibble over moot simply by the power of their music. Is that likely? Probably not. But a boy can dream.

Bob Dylan Song #140: Take Me As I Am

2009-08-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

I feel it's worth mentioning that it's about at this point in writing the Self Portrait reviews that I've finally experienced that moment where I wanted to throw in the towel - I'm four songs from the finish line, once I get this post done, and that finish line has never felt so far away. For the record, it's not entirely this song in question that's made me lose my will; it's more like a catalyst than anything else. I have no qualms with this kind of schmaltzy country music, with the pedal steel guitar out in full force and the ladies in the cowgirl getups singing away in the background and the drummer tapping that snare in that well-known way and the saloon piano tinkling away in the background and Dylan stretching out his country croon almost to the point of self-parody (and say what you want about that voice, but he never came as close to that point as he did here), I really don't. Who amongst us doesn't like "Stand By Your Man", for instance?

It's just that the cumulative effect of this album has finally caught up to me - I only played this album all the way through once in preparation for this seemingly never-ending series of posts, and it was roughly at this point that I finally had to take a break lest I fell asleep or blacked out or something. And even going post by post and song by song as I am now, I still find myself wanting to lay my head down on a cool, cool pillow and float off to dreamland. The issue is that there are already enough songs like that on this damn thing - do I really need another one? The RS review argues that the album might not look so bad if there'd been some editing and we'd gotten just the Nashville stuff like this; I feel, however, like putting this stuff back to back would've actually made the album even more boring. And it's a really painful thing to listen to an album by your all-time favorite artist and be bored by it. I can only imagine what his studio band must've felt - some of them had actually played on his Electric Trilogy and his great post-crash albums, some of the best music anybody has ever recorded, and now they're tap-tap-tapping their way through Country's Greatest Hits and "Little Sadie". Hard not to feel for them.

And now the bit I've wanted to discuss for a few posts, the section in the RS review linked to this song. You can read it in the link above; I won't bother summarizing it here. I find it amusing that, nearly 4 decades on, people are STILL talking about why exactly Dylan chose to name this collection of covers and live tracks and assorted nonsense Self Portrait, attempting to crawl into the mind of a man who a) is smarter than all of us and b) has made his reputation on being unpredictable. To me, what helps give this album so much mystery is that it's the first unpredictable move in his career that led to something not good - or, if you want to be charitable, something that the majority of us doesn't agree is either good or an outright masterpiece. The review speculates that Dylan is defining himself on somebody else's terms, but I don't necessarily think that's true - after all, we've never really known what it means for Dylan to define himself on his own terms anyway. This was a man who had worn what, four different faces by this point in his career? Bob Dylan's not even a real name, for the love of Pete. What's one more face, even if it's the face of the musicians he's loved?

The really important part of that blurb is the second part, complete with Duke of Windsor comparison. And that brings up something that not only Dylan, but every artist of any particular influence (aesthetic, political, or whatever) has to deal with - the idea of where that artist's responsibility lies. The RS review makes it all too clear where they feel Dylan's responsibility lies - the very next blurb suggests that we are tied to him "whether he likes it or not" (as to that question, I have a pretty good guess) and states that because H61R changed the world, his subsequent albums must also do so, "but not in the same way, of course" (gee, how charitable of them). Basically, according to them Dylan has already made himself a person of influence, and is bound by some sort of law or honor or whatever you want to remain a person of influence and to use that influence to shape the rest of mankind. Well, at least in an acceptable fashion - no more of this country bullshit, okay? And if he decides not to do so, because of this or that or the other thing, he's just another Puppet of The Man and a two-faced traitor like anyone that made himself a public figure, gave himself to us, and then had the indecency to snatch himself away.

I would hope the tone I adopted tells you how I feel about this; that kind of selfishness is almost laughable, even with the understanding that the times this review was born in could bring about that level of dramatic emotion. That Bob wanted to share his music with us is not just something incredibly special, but something precious few individuals are lucky to have ever been able to do. And that, by virtue of luck and circumstance, the music he recorded helped shape a crucial period in American society - that's simply not something Bob is accountable for. To be honest, the man's not really accountable for anything (well, other than not killing or raping or whatever...sorry, too much criminal law already). If Bob had never recorded another album after 1966, it would have entirely been his right. Quite frankly, if every artist that's currently on this planet today wished to stop recording or making albums or writing books, that is also entirely their right. To try and snatch that right away, and demand the artist no longer create art, but Shape The World, is beyond any of us. Quite frankly, were I in Bob's place, you'd have had no shortage of pictures of me getting on a plane somewhere. And I'll tell you this - I'd have never looked back.

Bob Dylan Song #139: The Boxer

2009-08-28T08:07:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

There are two songs on this album that would properly qualify as "notorious". One of them is "All The Tired Horses", quite possibly the most infamous recording Dylan ever officially released. The second would be this song, Dylan's cover of Simon & Garfunkel's classic "The Boxer", featuring a duet between the Nashville Skyline croon and Dylan's more "regular" singing voice (i.e. what we'd been hearing more or less since 1967). You can find your share of opinions on Dylan's reasoning behind cutting this song in the first place (parody, homage, take your pick); you can also find your share of opinions on the actual quality of the song itself, including whether or not it's clever or stupid (a fine line between both, let us not forget) to have that duet between Dylan's two different singing voices. It might not be a great cover, but it's never not been interesting.

At least, that's the general opinion. I personally find it kind of funny that a song so dull, half-assed, and throwaway can have such attention placed upon it - I understand why, of course, but even the most cursory listen to the song makes it hard to imagine that it really deserves it. Say what you want about Simon & Garfunkel's original, but what you can't deny is that it has a power and dramatic energy that makes it the masterpiece that it is (who amongst us can forget the two intertwining voices on the chorus mixed with that echoing, pounding bass drum?) and makes us want to delve deeper and come up with all sorts of theories about it being about this or that musician (ahem). That makes the complete lack of power in Dylan's version all the more evident - much like how "Blue Moon" suffers from Dylan singing it like he was just rousted from a particularly good nap, neither of Dylan's voices puts on a particularly good show here. Maybe that is the point, of course (parody? eh? eh?), but it doesn't make the listening experience any more bearable if it is.

In lieu of anything else particularly productive to say about this cover (I mean, it really does stink), I'd like to bring up a section of the RS review that I've passed over before - the bit about Arthur Rimbaud. Marcus plucks a paragraph out of what appears to be a biography/chronology of the infamous poet, covering the years right after Rimbaud had left Paris and his friend/lover Paul Verlaine, traveling with seeming aimlessness before he would settle in Abyssinia (what we call Ethiopia today) for basically the rest of his life. Intertwined therein is a quote from RS writer Charles Perry - "We know Dylan was the Rimbaud of his generation; it seems he's found his Abyssinia". It is that quote, I think, that sums up a great deal of what was thought about Dylan in those odd years where he was between peak periods, seemingly lost in a desert, content to lay down the pen that had served him so well and inspired so many.

It's important, I think, to give some thought to what that Abyssinia actually meant in Dylan's case. I suppose Self Portrait as a whole might be it; all the same, an album is not always a window into the soul of the artist recording it (being a big fan of Pinkerton, I would assume the dross Rivers Cuomo records now is not really representative of who he is as a human, and it kinda shakes me to think that it actually might be). So, then, I think you can safely assume that what's being considered Dylan's country of settling down is, in fact, him settling down; i.e., his family life. Because he has dedicated himself more to being a good husband and father (and because, arguably, his music has suffered for it), the blazing genius he shared with Rimbaud is gone forever. He has, in effect, entered early retirement. I've mentioned that I'll get to this a little later, and I still fully plan on it, but I want to point this out because it truly needs pointing out.

These were young men that wrote this review. Greil Marcus, for example, was all of 25 years old when he penned the great majority of it, and it's safe to assume that the rest of the authors were in the same general age group. These were men (and one woman) that absolutely, positively, undoubtedly did not want to hear that Bob Dylan, Voice of His Generation, was off dangling toys in front of his kid's faces or having coffee with his wife in some cafe in upstate New York. They were hip-deep in a cultural war that would define that entire generation, fresh off the pain of 1968 (the defining year of that generation, like it or not), still battling The Man and trying to carve out a niche for those that wanted to let their freak flag fly, and writing for a magazine that would serve as the Pravda for that niche. And their hero was walking away to settle in Squaresville, daddy-o. It seems a little silly now, with the proper perspective, but I don't blame them for comparing Dylan to Rimbaud and worrying that he'd given up something special for something entirely banal.

I keep thinking of one of the lines of that review - "Would Self Portrait make you want to meet Dylan? No? Perhaps it's there to keep you away?" And you have to wonder if that's what Dylan really had in mind; after years of the world beating down his door, maybe he just wanted to put a big "KEEP OUT" sign up on that door. The more you look back, the easier it is to sympathize.

Bob Dylan Song #138: Blue Moon

2009-08-25T11:05:00.001-07:00

Having listened to this song, I find it appropriate that Bob used his Nashville Skyline voice to sing this song, one of our most famous standards (many of you know the "bom bom bom ding a dang ding" doo-wop version, and of course there's Lady Day) and one of those tunes we've all probably heard at least once in our lives, whether we know it or not. Leaving aside the aesthetic issues of Dylan's sandpaper/grit regular voice vs Dylan's honeyed croon, we already have a whole album's worth of examples of Dylan's country voice wrapped around platitudes (of which Nashville Skyline has its share, even in the classics), and we know that for those platitudes the country voice works great. A song like "Blue Moon", then, which is saccharine in the way so many standards tend to be, would be a great fit for that particular voice.

It's almost disappointing, then, to hear the listless version of this song that crops up on Self Portrait; the drawbacks to Dylan's country voice (which I tend to enjoy in the right context) become more apparent when it seems like Dylan's downshifted to first gear. What comes off as relaxed and casual for something like "I Threw It All Away", a song that bears the hallmarks of concerted effort, instead sounds lazy and dispirited in this environment. The band behind him gives a very loose, minimal backing - even the backup singers sound like they'd rather be doing or singing something else. About the only interesting aspect of the song is the fiddle that occasionally crops up. I'm not saying that I was expecting Holiday's or the gorgeous version by The Mavericks (let alone the Marcels' doo-wop version, which is so late 50's-early 60's that you should only be allowed to listen to it on a transistor radio), but...well, I guess I don't know what I was expecting. Getting your hopes up for this album is really an exercise in futility.

That isn't to say, though, that taking a stab at "Blue Moon" was a wrong decision. I would assume that nearly every Dylan fan has had at least one discussion about the merits or lack thereof concerning Dylan's singing voice (I know I have), and at a certain point the pointlessness of the exercise makes you want to beat your head against a wall. I mean, we're all well aware that that sort of thing is entirely a matter of personal preference; besides, I happen to enjoy the way that Dylan sings, I believe that he has a technique and a delivery that accentuates his songs in a way that they'd be negatively affected if he'd sung them differently, and I think he does interesting things that a more classically trained or physically gifted singer might not dream of being able to do. And I especially say this with the country voice in mind; it's the closest Dylan got to what most people consider a more palatable singing voice, and sometimes I wonder what would've happened if he'd decided to develop that voice more and take his career in a different direction.

As I mentioned before, one of the perks of having a career like Dylan has had is that, at this point, Dylan has the creative freedom to do just about whatever the hell he'd ever want to do. To borrow Marcus' phrase, "in mythical terms, he doesn't have to do good, because he's done good". Marcus threw that out there because he believed that to be wrong (and in a certain sense, I agree), but that was in the midst of Dylan running away from his audience in 1970, with the scars of one of our nation's most crucial periods still fresh and with a nation turning its lonely eyes to him in the absence of Joe DiMaggio. With the full weight of his career now more or less settled (aside from his more recent albums, of course - I still think we're a few years off from seeing where Together Through Life or even Love and Theft sit in the canon), it can be reasonably stated that Dylan has done enough good that his need to do further good is more or less exhausted. If he wanted to record a death metal album, or a screamo album, or a Christmas album (wait, what?), he's entirely free to do so. As I'd also said before, he could've recorded this album this year and its reputation would probably be a lot different.

Which is basically my way of saying that if there was one avenue of the many roads this album went down I'd have liked to see Bob develop further, an album of standards probably would've been my choice. As we all know, when it comes to a standard, the arrangement and the passion you bring to it make all the difference in the world. Dylan's always had more or less his pick of crack supporting musicians, and I don't doubt that he has enough feeling towards these types of songs that he would've given them the requisite emotion to really make them take off. Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure what it would've sounded like back then (I dunno why, but I'm not quite as gung-ho for Bob doing an album of standards today, if that makes sense); the only real bases we have to go on are on this album, and they pretty much stink. But, if nothing else, it's always educational to remember that for all the twists and turns in Bob's career, there were a million other potentials twists and turns that never had the seed to take place. That's part of what makes Bob's career so damn fun, wouldn't you say?

Bob Dylan Song #137: Gotta Travel On

2009-08-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

Author's note: Well, the move-in went as well as I could've hoped for, so now I'm nice and settled in and ready to spend the next 3 years in...well, not hell exactly; more like a very expensive purgatory. What that means for the blog is that I'll probably try to get back to the tri-weekly posting system, but you shouldn't be surprised to see only two posts per week. Or, who knows, I might spazz out from all the reading and do an entry every day just to relieve some stress. We'll see how it goes...

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

One of the wittier moments in the RS review would be the description of Dylan's take on "Gotta Travel On" - "Dylan sings 'Gotta Travel On'". I read that and listened to the song and said to myself "yeah, that pretty much covers it". Taken at a more relaxed tempo than Billy Grammer's hit-single original, it still feels like a pleasant trifle and nothing more, yet another way to fill up a side with a song that, while good (let's not forget that), perhaps doesn't have the most compelling reason for its existence. At best, it's a competent take to a fine ol' country song that contributes to the overall feel of this album (complete with background singers!); at worse, it's another log to the fire that is the argument that this album sucks and should be shot directly in the face. Metaphorically speaking, anyway.

If I was feeling in a more puckish mood, I'd point out the amusing little thematic weight that this song might carry, in that Dylan is singing about "stay(ing) around/this ol' town too long...and it feels like/I gotta travel on". In a very broad sense, this sums up Dylan's entire career, that of a man who never quite feels comfortable in the skin he's wearing and ditches it for something new virtually every chance he can get (that said, he's worn the "mysterious old granddad of rock" skin for quite some time now, and seems totally comfortable in it, so...). In the more immediate sense of this album and where Bob stood in his career, you could see it as Dylan ready to move on from...well, what, exactly? His place as an exalted High Priest of Music? Or as Spokesperson of a Generation, a role he'd done his best to shed more or less from the moment his neck injury healed? Or from a career in music altogether? You could have quite a time trying to puzzle that one out, couldn't you?

That's a discussion for another time, though (in fact, it will occur a whole three posts from now); what I'd prefer to think about is this song and its reason for existence. In the aesthetic that Self Portrait has created, it actually fits in quite nicely indeed - we've got a well-known (#4 on the pop charts) crossover hit that jangles at a nice pace, certainly something Bob might have listened to during his days as a teenager in Hibbing, and a song that he might have even given a listen or two to while recording Nashville Skyline. It's a fun piece of work, the sort of thing you can tap your feet to for three minutes, and then move on to whatever comes next (unfortunately, what comes next is "Blue Moon", but that's yet another post). What the song amounts to, more than anything else (to me, at least), is a crowd-pleaser - the sort of song that you might gently applaud if you heard in concert, something familiar (at least, back then) that you can hang your hat on if some random traveling band busted it out on stage. That's a nice thought, isn't it?

Whether or not Marcus et. al. intended to do so (let's just say he did, to be nice and all), this song (along with the next two) are tied in to the rumored announcement of Dylan putting together a tour, coupled with the idea of Greta Garbo coming out of retirement to do some big stage shows, "possibly with Dylan". I'd like to hear how the hell THAT rumor came about, but let's assume that there was something to it and at some point there was the chance Dylan and Garbo would come together in the weirdest pairing since somebody decided pizza would taste great with pineapples on it. The funny thing is that while the RS writers treat this rumor in 1969/70 like a rumor that aliens were landing somewhere in their backyard, if Dylan tried something like this today (say, with Bette Midler or somebody), we wouldn't even bat an eye. I mean, there might be a few raised eyebrows here and there, but we've seen Dylan shilling lingerie, for God's sake. What else is there, really? I'm quite certain all of you know by now that Dylan is recording a Christmas album, that ultimate bit of consumer schlock, and not one of you is the least bit shocked by this. We all know Dylan has his showman side to him (what is Masked and Anonymous if not a massive feeding of that beast?), and nowadays we have no problem with that side occasionally showing itself.

In a very real sense, that ability for us to not be bothered when Dylan does something that smacks of showbiz or whatever is one of the most hard-earned aspects of his entire career. The weight of expectations on him was never greater than in those years after his first peak, and they must have chafed him in ways we could never be able to empathize with. Looking back on it, Self Portrait feels like a rough first effort to ditch those expectations, to surprise his audience while doing whatever the hell he feels like doing, instead of whatever we want him to do. That it turned out horribly and was received with scorn should, in retrospect, come as no surprise. That might be as good a defense of the album, then, that you could think up - an album whose worst crime is that it's basically wholly inoffensive, created almost like a flanking maneuver to get away from the crushing amount of expectation heaped upon his head. If Bob Dylan put out Self Portrait today, we'd probably all shrug our shoulders, go "that's our Bob", and pick out the best songs for a nice little iPod playlist we're cooking up. And it would have none of the weight of disappointment that the real Self Portrait carries. C'est la vie.

Bob Dylan Song #136: Copper Kettle

2009-08-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

Author's note: I've decided to put a premature end to the Self Portrait poll, as the choice to continue in regular style is ahead by a substantial majority. This leads me to believe one of two things - either the voters really do enjoy my blog style and want to see me continue sans interruption, or you're all brutal sadists that want me to lose sleep trying to make something out of "Take Me As I Am". Either way, the people have spoken, and I will heed your wishes. Thank you to everybody that voted!

Author's note, part 2: I'll be off for the next week, getting settled in San Diego and preparing for the task of surrendering 3 years of my life to USD's fine law program. Hell, if I make it out of this album alive, getting my J.D. will be a breeze. Thank you all again for your readership and support - I'll need it more than ever in the next 3 years, believe me.

In a weird way, this might be the cruelest joke of all on Self Portrait - that is, the fact that Bob chose to consign a song as beautiful as "Copper Kettle" to this way station for pleasant mediocrity. You don't really hear about this song being one of Dylan's best when it comes to the mainstream (any number of more hardcore Dylan fans have championed this song, make no mistake), and that's a real shame - surely if this track had made it to any number of the Dylan compilations currently available, more people would be aware of this great track on an album that supposedly contains no great tracks. I've even taken the opposite tack on this song and wondered if the song's cult stature is simply a by-product from the fact that it's ON Self Portrait and that putting it on an album with better material (like, say, the next one in his discography, where it would fit quite nicely, thank you) might make the song's glow fade. Thankfully, even a cursory listen to the song lets us know that that is not the case, and the song is as good as its fans say that it is.

One thing that really interests me, and that I think deserves some thought, is how it is that this song manages to fit completely and totally into the aesthetic that this album creates, while at the same time succeeding as well as so many other songs on that album failed. I mean, you've got all the elements there for the same old morass as everything else - a competent backing band, a particularly lush arrangement with strings and the like, some female backup vocalists providing particularly sweet harmony vocals. Bob even has difficulty staying in key for his vocal performance (which isn't necessarily a part of the album aesthetic, but does happen quite a bit throughout...), which I'm pointing out only because it actually has no bearing on how good this song is. The song itself is a decent folk tune about bootlegging (hmm...), with a catchy chorus (indeed, "The Pale Moonlight" is often used as a subtitle in the name of the song), but it's not on the lyrical level of a lot of Bob's own work. So what is it, then, that has captured so many hearts?

The answer, while purely a matter of personal opinion, also seems pretty obvious to me - this is one of the few songs on the album that actually summons up genuine, heart-stirring emotion. It might be a simple tale of making illegal whiskey at night, but somehow all the elements that turn all the other covers into...well, you know...somehow combine into their highest possible ideal here, giving this tune an almost cinematic (how I love that term) drama worthy of albums far better than this one. And Bob's vocal, far from being distracting by occasionally wandering into a different pitch, is full of the requisite emotion the track deserves, almost as though for once he really feels like giving a damn. We know what happens when Bob decides to give a damn - we usually get something magic. And yes, Bob delivers something magic here. To quote the RS review (which I'm not linking to for this post...unless you really want my opinion on Marcus saying he'd buy a record of Bob breathing heavily, and I don't think you do), "The fact that the rest of the album lacks the grace of "Copper Kettle" isn't a matter of the album being "different" or "new." It is a matter of the music having power, or not having it."

And that, right there, is the question that hangs over the entire RS review, and indeed hangs over the entire album - where is that power, and why is it only concentrated in a handful of songs? Looking at the songs that I've really liked so far as this album has gone along, we have an original that leans way more towards Nashville Skyline, a cover, and what really amounts to a novelty record. That is, to say the least, something of a motley crew. And yet you cannot deny that those songs have the essence of Bob's genius contained within, something sorely lacking on the rest of the album. That's something both confusing and difficult to deal with. Even accepting that Bob's muse was playing hide-and-seek for a couple of years, we're also left wondering why Bob also intermittently chose to submit real masterpieces while also submitting some real mediocrity. I would say "that's just my opinion, of course", but it's pretty clear that that opinion is shared by many, which is why I feel comfortable saying it that way. All that dross, and a few jewels tucked within - it's hard to fathom, sometimes.

This project has made it pretty clear how many defenders of this album are out there, and that any number of songs will have somebody in their corner. I don't begrudge anybody that. But the fact remains that "Copper Kettle" is a song with no need for defending, so strong and beloved is its cult status. Which, again, makes me sad that cult status is all that it will forever receive. I think the same thing of "Sign on the Window" (a post I'm really looking forward to), also consigned to an album that most people don't have much regard for (although it doesn't have nearly the reputation for sucking as this one does), also a song that deserves a much wider spotlight shone upon it. Sometimes a song, even a truly great song, can just fall through the cracks of history. Being able to catch it is one of the best feelings a fan of music can have.

Bob Dylan Song #135: Living the Blues

2009-08-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

Reminder: Vote in the Self Portrait poll on the right side of the front page. Only a few days left to register your opinion!

Those of you that were lucky enough to tune in to the first Johnny Cash Show on June 7, 1969 would have been intrigued and maybe a little surprised by Bob Dylan's appearance. You would've seen Bob walk out on stage, You would have seen him perform three songs, including a charming version of "I Threw It All Away", as well as reprising his duet with Cash on "Girl of the North Country" that arguably improves on the album version by virtue of being a tighter, more focused take. And you would have been even more surprised to hear a song that had never appeared on an album before, another low-key country song (a cover? an original?) with some nice backing from Cash's house band. That song would be "Living the Blues", a Bob Dylan original, and one of the highlights of Self Portrait (indeed, it probably would've been one of the highlights of Nashville Skyline). Why he played it on TV instead of, say, "Lay, Lady, Lay" is anybody's guess, but it's a pretty cool thing that he did, one of those strange side roads in Dylan's career.

As played on Self Portrait, "Living the Blues" trades in the more raucous energy of the Johnny Cash Show run-through in favor of a slower and statelier performance. Dylan does some of his best singing on the album here, maybe because it's a song he's more comfortable with, or maybe because singing it in front of a live audience (where he, perhaps, betrays some nervousness by occasionally losing his key and shouting some of the lyrics) helped him work out some of the kinks in his technique. And it's on this take where Dylan's backup singers really come in handy, as they add vocals that wouldn't be out of place in a Broadway musical or something (the "uh-huh"s in particular are fantastic), giving the track a little extra oomph. It's enough to make me wonder what some ladies doing backup or some Jordainaires-type adding harmonies would've done for Nashville Skyline - would the songs have suffered with that extra showbizzy touch, or would the songs have gained from an extra musical dimension?

I suppose in the "what-if" department that question doesn't rank particularly high with regards to Dylan's career, but I've always found myself more interested in the darker (i.e. less light shed) periods of Dylan's career, historically speaking. We know so very much about Dylan's peaks - No Direction Home, the Rolling Thunder Review, and so on. In fact, what made Chronicles such a fun read was that Dylan wrote about parts of his life that we didn't know so much about, eschewing yet another tale of getting stoned in Nashville prior to recording "Just Like A Woman" for stories about recording Oh Mercy and hiding up in New York. And I like to think about how Dylan's career might have changed if those lesser-known periods had changed in some way - like if Bob had released New Morning before this album, or if he'd never gone gospel, or if he'd done anything in the mid-80s. Even little things like "what would "One More Night" sound like with backup singers?" remind us of just how malleable history can be. We never know what can turn fortune entirely on its head.

This segues, I think, into this song's own little section in the RS review, a discussion about the music industry term "product" and how that connotes something we don't generally think about when we think of music. It's kind of amusing that this pops up for a song that would not be considered mere product, but that's neither here nor there. Marcus makes the suggestion that this is as close to product, rather than music, as Dylan has ever gotten in his career, and I think that the less charitable of us would agree that is true. Marcus, perhaps for the best, never outright states that this was what Dylan was intending to do, as this opens up a very ugly can of worms, but he certainly leaves the reader imagining that this might be the case. After all, when the comparisons he draws are to Dylan's first Greatest Hits album (we don't need to go into why that counts as "product") or with the Rolling Stones' odds-n-sods compilation Flowers (which, at least, holds some very strong music within, along with some interesting outtakes), it doesn't take a genius to see what Marcus is hinting at. And those were label-created Frankenstein monsters - Self Portrait, after all, was put together by the man himself.

I think, in the end, what keeps this from being the pure product Marcus worried it might be are the good songs, like "Living the Blues", that help make this album appear to be a little more than what it seems (reputation-wise, at least - Marcus is dead on when he talks about how the album is less than it might appear). Sure, the spark of creativity in Dylan may have been at a low point here, and the scattershot nature of the album as a whole will prevent it from ever really being considered as a curiosity at best and a travesty at worst. But, like many a bad album by a good artist, there is the occasional port in the storm, something you can hang your hat on and say "see? It's not all bad". I was asked by a commenter "you really hate this album, don't you?", and I don't, not really. The disdain for particular songs mounts up when you're going song-by-song, but the album as a whole is not so egregiously bad that I'd want to shout from the mountaintops about it. And a song like "Living the Blues" allows me to not hold the same cynicism as others do about this album, and to say "hey, we're all allowed a bad album sometimes", admitting that I'm free from the angst that led to Marcus et. al.'s mammoth review in the first place. Whatever good feelings you can get out of this album, perhaps the poorest reviewed in the history of rock music (considering the artist, of course), those are definitely worth holding onto.

Bob Dylan Song #134: Belle Isle

2009-08-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

Reminder: Vote in the Self Portrait poll on the side of the front page. You get to sway the direction of this blog - it's like Choose Your Own Adventure, only way more lame. Let your voice be heard!

In a weird way, it's kind of comforting to hear Bob go back to one of his roots, covering a very obscure Celtic/Canadian folk song (he's credited with writing the song, but the Dylan encyclopedia Keys To The Rain makes a strong case that it's a folk song). As we know, Dylan had not lost his admiration for the ever-wide and diverse folk catalog; his thrilling and gorgeous performance of "Wild Mountain Thyme" at the Isle of Wight is proof enough of that. Actually, it's gratifying that Dylan didn't use that performance as a trial run for a take on this album - I'd have hated to hear that tune gussied up with strings or backup vocals or what have you. Instead, Dylan chose this tune about a man meeting a beautiful maid on the shore of some lake, one that even hardcore folkies may not have heard before. How can you not like that?

As for the actual arrangement...well, it's beautiful to listen to, I'll say that. Keys To The Rain is not a fan of the strings arrangement, but I kind of like it in this particular context. The song is, after all, a tune about falling in love with a random woman on the banks of some random lake, and it's written in a way that almost demands a lush orchestral backing. That's one thing about this album I like, even a little - there's a certain consistency with all the string arrangements throughout the album, which helps give the album a musical identity (whether or not that identity is a good thing is entirely up to you). Unfortunately, Bob ruins the mood of the song by singing really badly out of key for the entire song; it's actually worse than "In Search of Little Sadie", in that there's a consistent chord structure to plant his voice in, and yet Dylan's vocals are just all over the map. Too bad - had Dylan actually chosen to rerecord those vocals (I wonder if those were his guide vocals and he just decided to keep them), this would be a real favorite of mine.

This particular section of the RS review happens to be one of the most interesting sections of the review; Marcus discusses the then-nascent bootlegging industry, which more or less kicked off with the release of Great White Wonder, and how Dylan's only chance of having his past completely co-opted by his audience (both in buying his bootlegs and ignoring his official output) was to release music with the power of the Electric Trilogy. Aside from the fact that it's pretty cool to think about how long some of the bootlegs we all know and have heard have been circulating for over four decades now, there's a really good point being discussed here. We've always been fascinated with Dylan's unofficial work, partially because there's so damn much of it (to the extent that the Bootleg Series was basically created to ward off all the guys getting rich because people wanted to hear "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"), but mainly because a great deal of that work is really fantastic. You can easily get lost in the maze of Dylan bootlegs (as I have), even more so now that it's expanded exponentially, to the point where the official catalog might not interest you the same way. Back in 1970, with Dylan's catalog a mere ten albums, this might be a huge problem.

The concept of Dylan as myth has never really gone away (and never will, I would guess), but will never have the same weight as it did in those days, when Dylan stayed as much out of the public eye as he could, only communicating with increasingly confounding albums. Marcus states that JWH and Nashville Skyline lack the power of his great electric albums, and while this is profoundly unfair (both albums have their own power, and actually benefit by not leaning on what you might consider Bob Dylan music to be at that point), there is something to be said for just how remarkable, beloved, and influential the Electric Trilogy really were, even more so a few scant years after their original release. There was a real sense (certainly seen in this review) that Dylan was shirking his duties to the marketplace and to his fanbase with this retreat into covers and half-baked ideas, with the release of what essentially amounted to an official bootleg. And I agree with Marcus - I'd rather be listening to Guitars Kissing and the Contemporary Fix than this.

You listen to songs like "Belle Isle" or "Blue Moon", and you can hear why this album was compared to a bootleg (under what other circumstances would Dylan release these songs???) and where all the worry comes from. Sure, individual moments stand out in a good way (in fact, we're getting to two of them in the next posts), but the album as a whole stands as testament to a man that could care less about his past and about his audience co-opting the same. And, in a funny way, there's something kind of liberating about that - I've written before about just how constricting it must have been to be Bob Dylan back then, and to experience something very few people (certainly not the RS staff, that's for sure) have ever experienced in the history of mankind. To hear Dylan not give a hoot about what anybody thinks of him, recording music only he wanted to hear himself record - that's exciting. Sure, the results may have been mostly dreck, but it was the dreck he wanted to make, unbidden by expectations or the weight of the world. You look at Self Portrait that way, and it actually kinda, sorta, just a little bit, seems a teeny bit cool.

Bob Dylan Song #133: Woogie Boogie

2009-08-09T05:10:00.000-07:00

Author's note: Read after the jump for some thoughts about the Self Portrait portion of this project.

Well, if we ever needed proof that Dylan's a fan of the blues, it's right here. Quite frankly, I've had moments where I've been a little surprised, maybe even shocked, by the people that have both defended this album as a whole and certain songs in particular. I know I shouldn't be; after all, just about anything with at least the slightest bit of artistic merit will have its defenders (you rarely, if ever, see a movie on Rotten Tomatoes at 0%, after all), and as that is purely in the eye of the beholder, it would be crass for me to begrudge anybody who says they enjoy Self Portrait or "In Search of Little Sadie" or something. I even can understand why people like the songs that they do, for the reasons that they do. You'd have to be pretty uncharitable if you couldn't.

Take this track, "Woogie Boogie", for example. I readily admit that I do not have the appreciation for the blues that I wish I did, and both the half-baked nature of this song (that it stays together for the two minutes this song lasts is a testament to, well, something, I guess) and the fact that it's a blues instrumental, for Pete's sake, make me feel like the recipient of some particularly baffling practical joke when I hear this song. On the other hand, 12-bar blues have their own innate rhythm and fun built in that can be enjoyable for nearly any arrangement (even The Beatles' unreleased stab at the blues, "12-Bar Original", has a thing or two going for it), and the brass arrangement/particularly screechy sax solo are a hoot to listen to. The song may not be particularly essential, even on an album in which seemingly nothing inessential has been left behind, but it's a cheap, fun thrill for two minutes, and that alone is worthy of a thumbs-up in this environment.

A reader named David left an insightful comment on the last post about how Dylan, during this time period, had lost his muse (cf. the well-known "I had to learn to do consciously what I could do unconsciously" quote), and Self Portrait is a result of that searching around, part of the process of regaining his voice. That idea had occurred to me (I'll write about it a little later, when we get to "Watching The River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece), as well as the theory that Dylan was attempting to create a bootleg record (including the Isle of Wight stuff lends more credence to that), as well as any other number of things people have speculated about this album. Now, I tend to be in the camp of "believe anything Bob says at your own peril"; after all, how many stories has he thrown out there about this album alone? Dylan's not really one to share his history (Chronicles nonwithstanding, of course - hey, when's Volume 2 coming out, Bob?), and when he does it's often like his own personal Rashomon. You can go down a real slippery slope if you choose to take him on face value.

In this instance, however, I'm willing to believe that there's something to what Dylan says when he refers to his muse deserting him. I don't think that he meant that his talent deserted him - after all, talent is talent, and it's pretty damn hard for somebody to completely scupper that. On the other hand, it's rather obvious that Dylan was not writing the type of songs that made him famous, and if we assume that he even wanted to, that points towards some sort of mental block preventing him from doing so. And as David suggests, that had to have been a scary experience. In that sense, Self Portrait becomes more of a fascinating experience, somewhat akin to watching a pitcher who once relied on a blazing fastball try to reinvent himself as a knuckleballer after blowing his elbow out one too many times. As I'd written in the "Tell Me Momma" entry, change is one of the hardest things for a human being to deal with, and we should give Dylan a great deal of credit for trying to work out his problems in the studio.

On the other hand...does that explain why Dylan felt the need to record THAT many covers? Or to put out the Isle of Wight tracks? We should do well to remember that Dylan would bolt for Asylum Records not long after this album (which most people believe led to Columbia releasing Dylan out of spite), and that there has to be something to Dylan handing Columbia 24 songs as part of his contractual obligations that really did not live up to what people expected out of Bob Dylan at this point in his career. And it does seem interesting that the very next album, New Morning, contains a great deal of great songs. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Of course, New Morning does have its share of clunkers, and this album does bear the occasional hallmark of somebody trying, so I'm not going to put too much credence into the theory I just advanced. It's just me speculating on this album - despite everything, it does have a level of intrigue that even some of his great albums don't really have. Gaze too long into the abyss, after all, and the abyss will gaze back into you. It probably doesn't say much that the abyss would see a great deal of puzzlement in me.

Okay, so.

Nathan, a longtime reader of this lil' blog of mine, posted a comment in the "Let It Be Me" post that gave me some pause. He noted that the posts are beginning to run together (I don't know if they are, but I can understand him saying so), that I've basically repeated the same stuff about each song (again, I can see that) and that I've dedicated a disproportionate amount of space to the RS review of this album (totally merited). In other words, he's basically written out the nightmare that I'd feared before delving into this series - that I've become uninteresting. All you wags feel free to toss out a "when were you NOT uninteresting?!?!" quip in 3...2...1...

All right, hope you got that out of your system. Anyway, it is during this particular album's series of posts that I've been most keenly aware that eyes other than mine are reading what I'm putting out. That's not me saying I'm surprised by that (I've been submitting to Expecting Rain for a good while now - any eyes other than mine are due in large part to that site), so much as it's me saying that the presence of an audience has not weighed as heavily as it is on me right now. And I welcome that, in a way - after all, without being able to challenge yourself, a writer could find his own well of creativity drying up, and I've certainly found myself in a challenge now. On the other hand, there are other people reading this blog, after all, and consideration to their feelings should also be given thought. I'd much like to keep the readers I have, now that I have some; you have no idea how much I appreciate people reading and posting, even the ones that dislike my writing. I feel blessed to be doing this for more than one person, every time I post.

I'd mentioned that I'd be writing both about the album and the review because they're so deeply tied to each other, and I stand by that. I also should mention (and this, I suppose, will be obvious) that I've been leaning on that RS review because at certain points I find myself at a loss for words. I make no bones about when I find myself out of my element or struggling for inspiration (the Basement Tapes series spring readily to mind - I had myself some hard moments, believe me, and some of the comments basically reinforce that), and I was pretty sure going in that it was going to be rough sailing trying to make heads or tails of a lot of this stuff. I wasn't going to sidestep the album, though - that would be disingenuous. The blog's title IS "Every Bob Dylan Song", after all.

However, as I said, the consideration of more than just myself now has to come into play, and the fact that just one reader felt strongly enough to write a post about what's going on with this series is enough to give me pause. Look, the last thing I want to do is be a quitter, or to feel like I've shortchanged anybody in this project, most of all myself. I still believe I can get through every song and find something to dedicate a couple paragraphs to, and the RS review, while a crutch, is a crutch that's given me a lot to chew on. We haven't even reached the real meat of that review yet, either - the ideas of Dylan's responsibility to his recording audience, or the auteur theory and how it relates to this album, and so on. I'm more than ready to continue down the same path, and with a smile on my face. After all, at the end of the day this is fun. If it weren't, I'd have stopped writing a long time ago.

At the same time, it can't just be fun for me, either. Any writer that puts his work out in a public forum has to realize that he is now writing for a party of more than just one, and thus cannot simply wallow in whatever pond he might want, if nobody else wants to wallow with him. I want this blog to be an enjoyable experience, and while I've occasionally taken detours for my own sake (I wasn't really sure ANYBODY would enjoy the Isle of Wight post), like any good serial writer, I want you guys coming back, post after post, as long as I have the wherewithal to keep moving on. This blog doesn't just belong to me anymore. It might be cliched to say that, but I firmly believe it.

And so, as you may have noticed already, there is a poll on the right side of this blog. On it are four options about the future of this particular series of posts. I leave it up to you to decide where I go from here. The poll will be open for a week, long enough for everybody that regularly reads this blog to make their opinions known on the matter. Whatever the decision may be, I will uphold it one hundred percent. Believe me when I say I want your voices to be heard, and this is a good way to let them be heard. I'll keep posting in regular style all this week, until the poll closes and I know which direction I will be taking from thereon out. Thank you all so much for reading this, and please vote in the poll. It really does mean a lot to me.

Bob Dylan Song #132: Little Sadie

2009-08-06T06:07:00.001-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

And now we've got the flipside to "In Search of Little Sadie", and I can safely report that it's a bit more pleasant of a listening experience than its sibling. For one thing, with an chord structure settled upon, the song is much easier to take on a purely aesthetic level (I should mention that I do find "In Search of Little Sadie" interesting from the haphazard way the song's cobbled together; it's just listening to it that I can't really get with). It might not be as experimental or whatever, but it's a recognizable song, and that gives it an immediate leg up. Also, the actual song itself has a groovy little arrangement, with some funky percussion going on (bongos? hmm) and a neat up-tempo groove to match. Dylan manages a reasonable vocal performance as well; while it sorta sounds like he's singing the song like he has a bus to catch in five minutes, he's not forced to grope around for the proper key to sing in, and that makes a real difference. And best of all, the song clocks in at a peppy 1:58 - that's not me saying "thank goodness it's so short", more like "that fits the song's arrangement, getting the song in and out". It's a pleasant diversion of a song, which is nice in this sort of environment.

The obvious question, then, is why we needed both of the versions of this particular song, a reasonable but not earth-shaking piece of work, on this particular album. I suppose you could ask "what is ONE version doing on this album?", but that's an entirely different issue. The RS review, rather uncharitably, suggests that this version of "Little Sadie" is part of what was being considered a perfidious industry practice to throw alternate takes on a song in order to a) push more product when somebody like Buddy Holly dies, or b) to just fill up a side on an album. Now, while I don't necessarily think that's the case (after all, there's a bunch of outtakes out there, two of which made it to the even less-loved Dylan, many of which have yet to see release - who wouldn't want to hear Bob's take on "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay"?), it does seem kind of strange that we have both two versions of this song and two versions of "Alberta", a full sixth of this album (that might tell you how long this damned thing is) given over to two songs played in different ways. It's another mystery on an album chock full of them, and one that might be worth thinking about.

If we are to assume that these four songs should be given special attention by dint of their twin status, why is it those two songs? There really isn't too much special about them - perhaps if two versions of "All The Tired Horses" or "Copper Kettle" showed up on the album, that might really raise some eyebrows, but we're talking about songs that can really be best described as "fine". I mean, even as far as covers go, these aren't all that great in that regard (although I kinda think "Alberta #2" would've been a nice addition on New Morning), yet we have two versions of each to choose from. It might be laziness on Bob's part, but then there's 24 tracks on this album, 20 without the live tracks, 18 without the instrumentals - covers or no covers, that's a lot of music for a man to record. Of all the things that you could accuse Bob of being for this album's sessions, I don't really think "lazy" would make the list.

The Pollyanna side of me has devised a theory about this; it probably runs more or less counter to everything I've said up to this point about the album, but I think it's worth suggesting nonetheless. Bob Dylan, to this point in his career, basically found himself wrapped in a cloak of mystery and speculation (he still is, to some degree, but never more so than after his first creative peak); it's a cloak he helped to create, yet it's there nonetheless. And it seems to me that he had grown weary of this cloak, of hippies searching him out in upstate New York, of a public clamoring for a man he no longer wanted to be, and of a fanbase demanding music he probably no longer had it in him to create. So we get an album of blase covers, head-scratching originals, live cuts from a show many consider disappointing, and the occasional spot of genius just for kicks. And on top of that, we get a few outtakes, examples of Dylan searching for the right sound (literally so, in the case of "In Search of Little Sadie", a title with a nifty double meaning I'm embarrassed to not have caught onto until now. Hey, better late than never), part of any recording artist's process but usually consigned to the vaults instead of put out on wax. And, in this way, some of the mystery is being forcibly removed by Bob. We can see a little bit of the Bob of that era, a man caught in creative limbo, mainly happy to play some songs he likes, unsure of himself on stage, and tired of those that think him a sorcerer of ill repute. I like to think that theory is true. Somehow, I doubt it.

A quick note - this section of the RS review contains a quote from counterculture fashion magazine Rags, in which the author posits that Dylan should create some kind of elaborate stage show out of That's Entertainment! or something, full of costume changes, beautiful girls, and hilarious Bing Crosby-like suits. I mention this both because it's really funny to think about, and because I also like to think that Bob might have enjoyed doing something just like this. We are talking about a self-proclaimed "song and dance man", after all. Frankly, there's still time. I wonder how Bob would look in Fred Astaire tops and tails...

Bob Dylan Song #131: Let It Be Me

2009-08-06T03:37:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

I wonder, at this point, what it is about this performance of "Let It Be Me" that bothers me so much. It's a reasonable enough take on the song - obviously not worth comparing to the Everly Brothers version (then again, the Everly Brothers have that whole "amazing vocal harmony" thing Dylan can't really draw on), but surely not the worst thing to be found on this album. Dylan hauls out the Nashville Skyline croon again to bring a softer treatment to the beautiful French tune, and the backup singers offer reasonably good harmonies. The band, as well, acquits themselves nicely enough. So then what is that burning itch that I can't quite scratch when it comes to this song, which is inoffensive and pleasant enough to actually constitute a possible highlight?

After some reflection, I've decided that what bothers me is that the Nashville Skyline croon actually shows up at all on this song. Now, I know that it pops up intermittently throughout the album (almost as though it's some sort of virus Bob's getting out of his system), so it's not like this is an isolated incident that I can point at. And I also don't have a problem with the croon in general; after all, it's probably my favorite part of the country album where it makes its worldwide debut. And yet when I hear it here I find myself disliking that croon, thinking of it more as a cheap joke or an easy out, something to actually lend some credence to a cover version that sort of lightly drifts by without actually making any sort of impact on our imaginations. In a way, this feeling kind of worries me - it's far too strong an emotion than this song probably deserves.

Maybe it's just my protective nature; seeing that I really do enjoy that "country voice" of Bob's, hearing it in a different setting, one that I don't particularly approve of, is a little too jarring. It'd be rather like putting Han Solo in, I dunno, Michael Bay's Transformers or something like that. It's odd to think that this would be the song to elicit this kind of distaste in me, but sometimes you can't predict those sorts of things. It's funny, too - I've heard that country voice singing the rather lame lyrics of "Peggy Day" as well as the gently beautiful lyrics of "Lay Lady Lay", and I should be accustomed to that velvety voice wrapped around words that don't really rank as some of Dylan's best. But to hear it on this album, singing lyrics as part of a cover version in a progression of them...it just rubs me the wrong way.

And now, a few words about the 7th section of the RS review. As mentioned in the previous post, Marcus paints us a tale of a young man who's responding to Self Portrait, comparing it to the pablum his parents listen to, even considering the dreaded re-gift when he receives the album as a birthday present. This leads to one of the most powerful sections (upon first reading) of the review, which I will quote here:

"To this kid Dylan is a figure of myth; nothing less, but nothing more. Dylan is not real and the album carries no reality. He's never seen Bob Dylan; he doesn't expect to; he can't figure out why he wants to."

Ouch! Pretty powerful stuff, no?

Well, what sort of robs this passage of its strength is an application of the common sense that occasionally gets tossed out the window when we're dealing with Art, Maaaan - Marcus mentions at the beginning that this imaginary kid's siblings "have been living with Dylan for years". Now, don't you think that those siblings might, just might, have let this imaginary kid give his classic albums a listen? I mean, setting aside the usual sibling rivalry crap that we go through in our youth, I'd like to imagine that a kid who would at least know what Self Portrait sounds like would have given Highway 61 a spin or two in their lives. And let's face it - much like the sister in Almost Famous that bequeaths her records to her brother before becoming a stewardess, if your siblings are cool enough to listen to Dylan, they're probably cool enough to let you hear those records for yourself. And by listening to those albums, I can only assume that Dylan no longer becomes a figure of myth; his image fills out thanks to those amazing songs, and the imaginary boy would indeed find himself wanting to see the amazing man who wrote those songs.

Marcus, by ignoring what seems like an obvious bit of business to the rest of us, does himself a disservice. It makes him a little harder to take seriously, you know? Music is such a communal part of our society - even the dreaded file-sharing that's raping the music industry is a type of communal experience, in a way, in that rare stuff we might never find in stores is available to those with broadband and the will to find it. The bigger the fan of music, in general, the more likely that person is to share music with somebody else, just in the off chance that that person will love something with the same all-consuming passion that they do. And yet here's one of our foremost music critics, willfully ignoring that communal aspect, just so he can make a point about Dylan's worst album existing on an island and some poor bastard being tossed on said island. With no offense to the author of those lines, that seems disingenuous to me.

Bob Dylan Song #130: In Search of Little Sadie

2009-08-04T04:36:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

Probably the strangest song on Self Portrait, if only because it doesn't actually register as an actual song. That's kind of interesting to think about; we come in to a new song with certain preconceptions, based on any number of songs we've heard in the past. There's probably going to be a verse, chorus, and middle eight, a fixed chord structure, lyrics that tie into each other all throughout, and so on. However, with "In Search of Little Sadie" one of those basic tenets is violated. Not the lyrical part - Dylan basically takes an old Western ballad ("Little Sadie" or "Badman's Ballad", famously recast as Live at Folsom Prison highlight "Cocaine Blues") and casts it as his own, retaining the clear story and basic progression of that type of song. What I'm referring to, of course, is the chord structure, or the lack thereof. Whether by experiment, goofing around, or some weird impulse, Dylan switches up the chords all throughout the song, creating a very strange and not particularly aesthetically pleasing effect.

Plain and simple, the song is ugly - an ugly experience to listen to, as Dylan more or less tosses aside any notions of what you'd want to hear musically in a song, as though he arrived at the studio with lyrics and wanted to do a little soft-shoe improv for the folks back home. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work when you're committing a song to tape that will be pressed onto vinyl for public consumption. And it'd be one thing if Dylan did this all throughout the album - then we could suggest that Dylan was, I dunno, inverting our common views of what songs are meant to be, changing around the very notion of music as a flowing listening experience, and experimenting with what we as human beings expect from music, popular and otherwise. Alas, I would think it more likely that Dylan was just messing around in studio, looking for a working chord change and playing around with the song's tempo, and just decided to stick the whole thing on the album. It's the equivalent of releasing a rehearsal, and nobody really wants that.

"In Search of Little Sadie", in a weird way, is emblematic of the album as a whole. When you look at the entire thing, it stinks. If you take a closer look, there are some elements that stand out - Dylan's singing is pretty good when he's not trying to keep up with the constant key changes, for instance. And all throughout is the feeling that maybe if Dylan had put in a little more effort, hadn't entered the studio with either no plan or a bad one, and had really put his soul into the take (unfortunately, the alternate version of "Little Sadie" suffers from that same lack of soul), something really good or at least really palatable might have come from the whole enterprise. Instead, we get something slapdash, rough to listen to, and ultimately kind of listless. It's a bummer, really.

So this section of the review has one of the most interesting moments - the "parable" of "the four questions", which I won't reprint here but can be read in the review link above. I made a reference in the very first post about how exceptionally pretentious this review is, and you need no further proof than this moment right here. What's funny is that the little "parable" in question is something that has a lot more weight the first time you read it than in subsequent readings. Yes, a lot of the lure of the paintings that hang in famous galleries (at least, for tourists, which the family in this parable clearly are) is the name that's signed on the canvas, perhaps even more so than what else is on there (incidentally, the third son that coyly said "it's a frame" deserves a smack upside the head - thinks he's so smart, the little wiseass). And that parable certainly would apply to Dylan in this case - for all the sins on this album, and they are many, they are much more easily forgiven because of the man committing them. If some random unknown artist had released this album, it wouldn't be nearly worthy of this attention. But it was Bob Dylan that put it out, and that alone at least begs for a listen.

What makes Marcus' clever bit of business fall apart is that he never gets into what that family thinks AFTER they've seen the artwork they traveled so far to see. We can be told how great Toulouse-Lautrec is until our ears hurt, after all, but it means nothing until we get to take a look at one of his paintings for ourselves. It's the same thing with Bob Dylan, actually, and it's kind of funny that Marcus misses the point later on when he talks about how Dylan's just a name to some random kid (I'll get to that in the next post). In the end, you may come to something because of its name and reputation (which makes sense - nobody just randomly stumbles onto Ozu or Picasso, they have to be told about them), but what makes you stay with that something is its quality. That nameless family may have traveled all that way because it's a famous artist what they saw on the teevee and whatnot, but if they actually enjoyed the painting for its merits, that's all that matters. And, ultimately, when it comes to Self Portrait it feels to me like the people that enjoy this album like it IN SPITE of it being a Dylan album, that they can be relaxed by the music without dealing with the attendant baggage of The Great Genius of Our Time and what have you, something you can't always say for his truly beloved and classic albums. That's something special, in its own way.

Bob Dylan Song #129: Early Morning Rain

2009-07-29T19:26:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

It occurs to me, listening to this track, that I'd never really gotten into the whole late 60's-early 70's singer-songwriter deal. Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor, John Denver - you got a couple good songs in there, but it was just never my cup of tea. And hearing Dylan's runthrough of "Early Morning Rain" doesn't exactly change my mind. The RS review has particularly harsh words for this particular track; references are made to the "mawkish" quality of the actual song, the "stiff-formed-vowel" vocal, and an extremely uninteresting and generic backing track. And I'm absolutely with them - calling this song "cookie-cutter" might be an insult to cookie cutters. Perhaps if the song wasn't so bleh (to quote Patton Oswalt, "feelin' kinda sorta") to begin with, some of the lesser qualities of the track could be overlooked. Sadly, that's not the case.

A couple of readers have suggested that Dylan was highlighting the music that he was into on this album (which I'm inclined to believe), offering up the cornucopia of covers as a way of saying "hey, this kind of music is what I liked then and like now, so this is just an homage". That's kind of nice in that a) it does seem like a cool thing for Dylan to do and b) it alleviates some of the blame for the fact that the album's so bland, but it does raise a few questions, especially when it comes to a track like this. Dylan has basically been considered the first singer-songwriter from the moment the term "singer-songwriter" came into existence, and it's pretty safe to say that guys like Taylor and Lightfoot would not have had the careers they did without Dylan pointing the way. So why, then, does Dylan feel the need to highlight a brand of music that is basically, well, his brand of music, only with all the edges buffed away to make mass consumption all the easier? Look, I have nothing against "Leaving on a Jet Plane" or "You've Got a Friend"; those are all fine songs for what they are. But it's entirely disappointing to hear Dylan, who relates to those songs the way The Godfather relates to, I dunno, Analyze This or something, try his hand at what basically amounts to a pale imitation of his best work. If you like this song, I don't know what to tell you. To me, it's one of the things that makes this album such a failure - a cover version with no reason to exist, performed in a way that gives it even less of a reason to exist.

(Author's note: You might want to stop reading here - the next three paragraphs get REAL thorny. Apologies in advance; believe me, I gave myself a headache writing this out. Hey, points for honesty, right?)

I found myself really puzzling over the section attached to this song - to me, it's one of the stranger bits of the review. We do have to remember that this album was made in a period of seclusion for Dylan, in which he seemed to have no interest in the outside world (although he almost certainly kept up with it; this is a bright guy, after all) and attempted to create art with no real bearing therein. This isn't impossible to do - Nick Drake's final album and Emily Dickinson spring to mind - but it is a lot harder if you don't have those bearings in the real world, with any particular idea of what's going on around you. The funny thing is that you don't really get too much of that in Dylan's Electric Trilogy; even an album like Blonde on Blonde was becoming far more insular as Dylan started to disappear into his own navel. To be honest, the only real reason people think of much of that music as being part of the revolutionary 60s was that it was released during the revolutionary 60s. I do believe that songs like "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Ballad of a Thin Man" owe something to the changing times, and that Dylan was just as much a creature of his era as vice versa. But Dylan gave up real social protest in 1964. The music that RS crowd revered was no "Only A Pawn In Their Game"; so much of it was invested with meaning it was probably never meant to have. Marcus suggests that music can only be made in times before and after revolution - so what do we make of Dylan's music, supposedly the benchmark of a musical (and, arguably, cultural) revolution?

It's the last sentence, though, that really sticks in my mind: "but in the midst of it all artists sometimes move in to recreate history. That takes ambition." Aside from the fact that the sentence is somewhat confusing (in the midst of what? Revolution? The pre-revolution decadence? The post-revolution deluge?), you have to ponder if that sort of artistic movement really does, indeed, take ambition. Unless I'm missing something, what Marcus is suggesting is that these artists will dip into the past during times of great cultural foment, both to remind us of what has been and to show us what might be (those who do not remember the past, etc., etc.), and that requires some doing. In that, then, I am inclined to agree with Marcus to a certain extent - if Ridley Scott's Alien, released during Reagan's second administration, really is an allegory of the Vietnam War, then that gives it extra layers and displays ambition. The flipside to this coin, though, is that recreating history can also breed a certain amount of laziness, the whole standing on the shoulder of giants deal. For every great piece of art that draws on history, there are any number of others that fail miserably.

I assume that the whole rigamarole is in regards to what Self Portrait is - essentially a pastoral album, one made up of covers, older folk songs, and more contemporary "light" music. Not only does it not make any effort to recreate history, it more or less sinks into history, tethered to a certain era as firmly as the Pet Rock or a high-top fade. You could argue that the revolution, in all its ill-defined glory, had ended by now, with the Silent Majority fully in charge, and with a counterculture grasping for leadership and for something to tell them "it's gonna be all right, maaaaan". And Self Portrait is most assuredly not that album. That had to have pissed Marcus et. al. off to no end. I assume I'll be returning to this point as these posts go on, but it's still going to remain as valid then as it is now. Great albums transcend their era, after all. When you've tied music inextricably to its release date, you suck a lot of life out of it. Self Portrait had its life sucked out from the very beginning.

Bob Dylan Song #128: Days of '49

2009-07-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

So what we've got here is Bob playing something that might appeal to his nature, an old folk song about a rambling old vagabond's misadventures during the Gold Rush era. That, right there, touches on three of Dylan's favorite things - Americana, tales of a roving ne'er-do-well, and his overwhelming love of gold (okay, that might be King Midas). It seems like a slam dunk on paper, and Dylan does his level best to live up to that billing, giving the tune a dramatic minor-chord acoustic arrangement (which makes it sound quite a bit like "As I Went Out One Morning", actually) and some really brassy horns on the chorus. And, for the first few verses, the song works really well, as Dylan puts quite a bit of oomph in his vocals and the band reacts in turn. If nothing else, this gave us the straight-out dumbest moment in the RS review, where Marcus suggests that Dylan, in singing "just like a roving sign", might have been deliberately avoiding singing "just like a rolling stone" in his take (I mean...really, Greil?), and that bit of comedy is worth something, I think.

The problem with this song, unfortunately, is that it overstays its welcome; the damn thing is five and a half minutes long, after all. I found myself thinking of Dylan's 1967 songwriting era, encompassing the Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding, and how Dylan had carved out a new songwriting style that waved its flag in the name of brevity. You listen to those songs, precious few of which even approached the four minute mark, and it's easy to marvel at Dylan's economy of songwriting, and of how he told stories and painted pictures and established vivid characters with startlingly few words. Now, "Days of '49" does this pretty well; it makes sense that Dylan would be drawn to a song that so strikingly tells tales of characters meeting their doom in the good ol' days or what have you. But every good storyteller needs to know when his story's been told, and at nearly 6 minutes the story's been told way too long. YMMV on this; I just sort of lose patience near the end, and judging by the way the band kind of staggers to the finish, I'd dare say they did as well.

This particular song's section is devoted to a small snippet of conversation between GM (Marcus, I'd assume) and JW (who I'd also assume is Jann Wenner), talking about this particular album and its lack of ambitiousness. Wenner suggests that it might be a good thing that Dylan's releasing something without any ambition to it, which I don't particularly understand, and never really have. Perhaps somebody can shed some light on that for me. Then, after Marcus suggests the obvious, the two of them reach a consensus on what Self Portrait actually is...a "friendly" album. And this statement, which I can only believe is meant as a putdown, is something worth thinking about. Because, let's face it, this really IS a friendly album. There's none of the acidic quality of his Electric Trilogy, nor some of the rougher edges of his immediate post-crash work. Self Portrait is the smiling face of Bob on the Nashville Skyline taken to its logical extreme, with a showman's eagerness to please thrown in, and with everything polished and spit-shined and cleaned up in a way a regular visitor of Branson, MO could love. For a Dylan fan - hell, for a music fan - that's an unsettling prospect.

And that plays directly into the era that music had descended into when Self Portrait was released. When Marcus says that "what we need most of all is for Dylan to get ambitious", not only is he playing directly into the "Dylan uber alles" attitude that led him to seclusion in the first place, but he's speaking for a generation that was losing heroes left and right and was starting to feel like the revolution was over before it really began. The dark side of the 1960s, the one the boomer generation tends to gloss over, is what I've talked about more than once on this blog - the idea that the hippies and peace lovers ultimately lost, that it was Nixon in the White House instead of McCarthy or RFK, and that a well-written tune really couldn't change the world after all. That's a sobering prospect, to say the least, and it's small wonder that hearing Dylan sing an album of standards and covers would've been even more sobering. Talking about peace and love is fine and all, but ultimately action is what counts (and, unfortunately, the flower power generation only got so far where that was concerned, but that's a subject far beyond the ken of this humble blog), and putting a smile on your face only takes you so far. That's what Marcus and Wenner are bummed about - Dylan, at a time where many were long past smiling, refused to take that big grin off his face.

And, right there, another piece of the puzzle that is this godforsaken album falls into place. One wonders how the cognoscenti of 1970 would've received an album full of brazen electric garage rock from Dylan, even if the lyrics were far below his mid-60s standards, and even if it was apparent that he was just putting this music out to placate those that so badly wanted placating, that just wanted Daddy Bob to say everything would be all right. Instead, they got an album of happy pablum, of Dylan strumming his way through "Blue Moon", for the love of Jesus, and seeming like he could give less than a damn about the fanbase that idolized him and pined every day after his public disappearance for him to return, like some kind of drugged-out MacArthur. And the lashing out and crushing reviews and disdain become that much more explainable. I'm not saying they're wrong that this album sucks - okay, "sucks" might be harsh, but that's as far as I'll bend - but you wonder how much of that anger is directed towards something that Bob didn't intend to be there. And, for that, this collection of harmless tunes deserves a little bit of sympathy, forty years on.

Bob Dylan Post #127: I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know

2009-07-26T06:43:00.000-07:00

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

I'd stated not two posts ago that I'd considered this song to be one of the highlights of an album not really noted for them; I made that statement based mainly on my memories of having heard the album some time back (this really isn't part of my regular rotation, as you might have guessed). Upon listening to the track again, I now believe I was mistaken. The RS writers pegged it pretty well as "a slick exercise in vocal control" - not that there's anything wrong with those, but it's not exactly something you would expect out of Bob, who has earned something of a reputation of not particularly giving a damn about how his vocals sound. If nothing else, the word "slick" aptly sums up what this track is all about, as everything sounds like it's been burnished to a glossy sheen with Pledge or something. Some might suggest that this is the perfect environment for Dylan's country croon; I think that taking that voice out of the more down-home rustic environment of Nashville Skyline and plunking it into (for lack of a better term) a huge wankfest does it no favors. It all adds up to a strange bit of business, a song that is more easily admired than actually liked.

Of course, that's not to say that people might actually admire this song - it's technically well played, sure, but that doesn't really mean anything. But what makes the song so difficult to like is what many Dylan detractors feel is a real weak point for Bob's music - the fact that he keeps you at an emotional distance. I don't really see how that's the case with much of his classics, but it certainly applies here; between the glossy production and Bob's droll vocal performance, there really isn't much genuine feeling that you can glean from this song. Seeing as how so much of music's appeal lies in feelings and emotions, that constitutes something of a problem. There is a lot more of that rote playing throughout the album, music with a certain amount of skill but not too much feeling, and that drags the album down more than the actual material Bob chose to record does.

This sort of leads, then, into the 3rd section of the RS review, where an unidentified person discussing how his feelings about this album make him question his feelings about Dylan's previous music, perhaps wondering if he'd overrated those songs and albums all this time. As part of this discussion, he plays the Isle of Wight version of "Like a Rolling Stone" again and ponders just what a trainwreck it is by comparison to the original. Now, while there's an element of this piece that feels just a little bit too pat (if anybody REALLY believed this music was comparable to what Dylan was up to in the mid-60s, he'd probably need his head examined), this does raise an interesting debate about what exactly music means to us and how we perceive music. We are, after all, talking about one of the most notorious albums ever released; there isn't a shortage of issues to discuss here.

In the opening section of that 3rd part, the anonymous speaker asks two questions. The first one is "was the mid-60s stuff not that good and this stuff is just as good?" Now, most of you would obviously answer "of course it is", and I'd be right there with you. There is, however, probably a very tiny minority of the population that would disagree, and would take songs like "It Hurts Me Too" and, well, this one over "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat" and "Gates of Eden" and all those classics we know and love. Now, does this necessarily make them wrong for feeling that way, or make their opinions on music any less valid? Of course not. Still, I would assume that most people that listen to music and really, deeply care about it (for better or for worse) would probably agree that the Electric Trilogy knocks this album into a cocked hat. That cannot be a coincidence.

That leads into the second, and more interesting, question that was asked - "was it some sort of accident in time that made those other records more powerful, or what?" We all can surely concede that timing plays a major part in both making and breaking bands - think of how perfectly suited Nirvana was to break out as hair metal began to give way to alternative music, or any number of indie bands that toiled in obscurity during their time only to receive great acclaim after their careers ended. And I also believe that context has a huge part in determining the fates of certain albums and singles. As great as those Electric Trilogy albums are, it doesn't seem like a stretch to suggest that their reputations have received a boost from the mere fact that they were released in arguably the most fertile period in the history of popular music, and that their impact might not be as major if they hadn't influenced so many other artists (not that it's Dylan's fault in that regard). And a lot of the argument for Self Portrait as misunderstood comes from taking the album out of its environment (as an aside, the RS review should be read as entirely of its environment, the post-Altamont era where rock stars began dying off and the hippie era began to fall away) and listening to it outside its massive dead cat of a reputation. I don't buy those arguments, myself - quality and lack thereof transcends generations - but they're still there to be made, all the same.

What makes the experience of that anonymous friend so noteworthy is that, by worrying if one bad album tarnishes a host of good albums (it doesn't), he calls in to question the notions of what a good and bad album actually are. Ultimately, much like beauty itself, those questions are left up to the individual person. It's really kind of incredible that so many people can reach a consensus on anything that has its merit called into question, let alone something so artistically inclined as a piece of music. And it is the minority that isn't part of that consensus that makes debating music or film so much fun, trying to figure out if The Conversation is Coppola's real masterwork or if Dylan's truly great run was in the mid-70s instead of the mid-60s. Sometimes it's nice to have what you believe is true to be called into question. That way, you can know for certain just how true what you believe actually is.

Bob Dylan Song #126: Alberta #1

2009-07-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

NB: From now on, I will be posting a link to the Greil Marcus Self Portrait review at the top of every post of this series. Take a look at it; it'll help with the posts. Trust me.

http://expectingrain.com/dok/div/greilmarcusselfportrait.html

Perhaps I'm wrong and I've already forgotten something, but I believe this is the first studio track where Dylan has other singers offering backup vocals behind him. This will soon become more common in Dylan's music (especially on the next album, New Morning), but here it's a bit of a shock. That's really the only shocking thing about this number; apparently a traditional Bob adopted as his own (if GM's review is to be believed), "Alberta #1" is a sleepy little number that mainly showcases Bob's post-country singing voice and some quiet harmonica work, but not too much else. It's a fine song, if I can damn it with faint praise. I do find its presence here interesting in the sense that on an album named Self Portrait (I'm going to make much of this in the future, if you didn't already suspect as much), Dylan's chosen to include a traditional song he's now stated as his own song, much as he did on his first album. That's a sly bit of self-awareness right there.

So in the second portion of this review, Marcus relates a tale of a (possibly, maybe even probably) apocryphal radio DJ who's spinning the record and not getting anybody calling in to hear more cuts off what is usually a huge draw in a new Dylan album. Eventually he ends up conducting a poll of his listeners to determine whether or not the album deserves to be played any more that night. Whether or not the story's true, there probably were a few DJs who played this album (back in the days when you were allowed to do this sort of thing) to a rather baffled audience, and found themselves just as baffled by the lack of feedback about the whole thing. This was BOB DYLAN, after all, and not only was his new album a big ol' mishmash of...well, who even knows what to call this stuff, but there was nothing that really hit you the way any of his classic songs did, especially when coming out of transistor radio speakers. His best songs of the Electric Trilogy era practically leaped out of the speakers, grabbed you by the collar, and dared you to listen to them. These songs, on the other hand, sorta leaned back in a rocking chair, lit up a pipe, and said "well, you can listen if you wanna, no big whoop". That doesn't really work for the radio.

What I like most about this particular anecdote, though, is how it portrays something that basically never happens in radio anymore. I had a chat with one of my friends about a week ago, after one of my favorite DC radio stations flipped formats to sports talk, where we debated whether or not radio was a dying industry. Whether or not it is (I believe it is, he felt quite the opposite), there's no denying that the industry has changed in ways that clearly are not for the best, and that the tribulations of the music industry have a lot to do with that. There are some readers who might remember, or may have even heard, when a few Northeast radio stations played the acetates of Glyn Johns' original mix of The Beatles' Get Back, the album that would eventually become Let It Be. And these were major stations, by the way, stations that played popular music and basically decided to air an album that had yet to see official release. I'm not saying it's a good thing to broadcast bootlegs like this, but if it'd happened today the stations would've received massive FCC fines and may even have faced license issues, not to mention the fact that the album would've been chopped up over several long commercial breaks, live reads, traffic reports, and so on. That, basically, is what modern radio is today.

Much in the same way that the "event album" has more or less disappeared with the rise of file sharing, the splintering of popular music, and the decreasing in outlets for music videos to really boost the album's exposure (I mean, putting your song in a commercial just isn't the same thing, I'm sorry), the idea of radio as a way to really break an album is more or less disappearing as well. Popular music radio has always been single-driven, of course, but there were still outlets where entire album sides could be spun for those that couldn't afford record players or just wanted to hear an album before plunking down a few bucks for it, and there were still DJs committed to playing music in this format and giving artists the attention they deserved beyond a 5-second backsell en route to another 40 straight minutes of classic rock or whatever. That was the environment where an album like Self Portrait could be spun the whole way through at night, and where the DJ could talk to his listeners about what they were hearing. That sort of thing builds a communal experience. That communal experience is going the way of the dinosaur, I believe, or at least when it comes to music.

It doesn't really matter, in the end, whether or not Self Portrait was worthy of the airing that that DJ gave it that night, even compared to the worthiness of Dylan's classic albums. What does matter is that there was a forum for that album to be aired, and for people to call in, ask for a track to be re-aired, and maybe share a thought or two about what he or she was hearing. Maybe that will come back some day, beyond the fringes of college radio or outside the grip of major commercial entities that only care about ad revenue and sticking to the playlist and so on. I'd like to believe that this will happen. I'm sure I'm just being naive.

Bob Dylan Song #125: All The Tired Horses

2009-07-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

(1)

Much the same way that peanut butter is inextricably linked with jelly, Bob Dylan's magnum anti-opus Self Portrait is now inextricably linked to its infamous review in Rolling Stone, with Greil Marcus' thoughts on Dylan weaved together with actual thoughts on the songs themselves. Thanks largely to Marcus' opening gambit "What is this shit?", coupled with Rolling Stone's nascent reputation as a cultural juggernaut (as opposed to whatever the hell it's supposed to be today - "wow, the Jonas Brothers AND PJ O'Rourke! Finally, all my dreams have come true!"), the reputation of Self Portrait was more or less instantly cemented to what it is today; i.e. a black mark on Dylan's impressive canon. As you might expect, there are plenty of people who go against the grain in this regard and hail Self Portrait as either a masterpiece (like Ryan Adams does) or at least not as bad as everyone says. And while they may be correct in that it's not the worst album ever recorded (that would be Metal Machine Music, lest you're wondering), it's simply not worthy of any type of reputation reconstruction. Simply put, it's not so much a terrible album as just an album. That isn't a good thing.

As you also might expect from a trainwreck that has assumed legendary proportions, people have spent vast amounts of time trying to figure out exactly what the hell these 24 (!) songs are all about. Eyolf Olstrem, proprieter of my beloved Dylan Chords website, put together a mini-essay that touches on some of the theories as to how this album - a double-album, let's not forget - came into being, and noted Dylan writer John Howells compiled a selection of quotes from Bob and some of the musicians on the album in order to piece together the mystery. Obviously, there's no real point in doing so, much as there's no real point in trying to get the answer out of Bob (he ain't telling), but the fact that there are people still willing to try says a lot. This is, plain and simple, a baffling album, all the way around.

It remains more baffling when you actually hear the album. What's really mind boggling to me isn't the fact that the album is godawful, so much as the fact that it honestly could have been so much more. Leaving aside "All The Tired Horses", a great (yes, I said "great") song that really does defy any kind of reasoned analysis, you can find some actual gems amongst the half-baked covers and sleep-inducing morass found here. "Copper Kettle", the Isle of Wight tunes, "I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know" (perhaps that's just me) - certainly for our iPod generation, there are a few cuts that I'd stash on my player without any second thoughts. The problem is that, in the presence of such mediocrity (and I mean that in its most basic sense - most of the songs are neither good nor bad, just there, kinda like a dust bunny or something), those gems lose their luster, becoming part of the furniture and little more. The really worrisome thing is that, perhaps, the really good songs were the mistakes all along.

For this series of posts, I'm going to try something a little different, if for no other reason than to possibly retain some sanity and not dedicate 20 posts to simply saying "what the hell can I say about this?" over and over. The review that Marcus et. al. wrote for Self Portrait can be found here. If you haven't read it, I absolutely urge you to - not only is it a nuanced and intelligent piece of work, not only is it less a screed or a complete takedown of the album than a concerned and well thought out look at a man at an obvious crossroads, but it's as fine a piece of musical criticism as we'll see in this or any other decade. It's also staggeringly pretentious, which makes it so much fun to take shots at. And with that in mind, I will be using that review as the baseline for MY reviews - not for all the posts (well, maybe - depends on how much will I lose as we go along), but for the majority of them. I'll talk both about the song in question, the RS crew's response to the song, and whatever Marcus is going on about for that particular song/number. I think this might just work.

Now, I can see you people either scratching your heads at just how meta all of this is ("he's reviewing a review? What?!"), or getting annoyed at how lazy just piggybacking on somebody else's work might be. And I don't blame you. But as I said at the start, the album and the review are more or less joined at the hip now, both of them actually helping to inform and explain the other, giving the album a life and a vitality it surely would not have if Rolling Stone had just opted for a simple "this album sucks" review. And I believe it's worth exploring both of those pieces of work, in order to get a clearer picture of both Self Portrait itself and the era that led to that fateful review. What the hell - if nothing else, this'll be more interesting than going on about Nashville sessions and what have you. To quote AMG's Stephen Thomas Erlewine, "that doesn't necessarily mean that it's worth the time to figure it out — you're not going to find an answer, anyway — but it's sort of fascinating all the same." Indeed.

(2)

Of all the songs on this album that actually do receive any sort of publicity, "All The Tired Horses" is by far the most (in)famous. We're talking about a song on a Bob Dylan album in which Bob Dylan does no singing whatsoever, the actual vocalists sing a grand total of one lyric, over and over and over, (never has the "written by" credit meant so very little), and the single acoustic guitar is overwhelmed by a grandiose string section and some piercing organ work. Little wonder that the song has attracted so much attention - I can't think of a weirder environment for the tune to show up than in Manhattan* indie venue The Cake Shop (dig the one Self Portrait defender in the comments!), where a charming and off-key singalong morphs into a blast of shambolic rock noise. To be honest, the clanging cymbals and shaky strummed chords fit way better for the song than the operatic arrangement Bob devised for the tune. But that's just me.

As I wrote above, I consider this to be a great song; I don't consider it great in the same way "Like A Rolling Stone" or "All Along The Watchtower" is great, of course, but it is great all the same. What makes it great to me, given my puckish sense of humor, is just how bloody-minded the whole damn thing is. This, after all, is the leadoff to an album titled Self-fucking-Portrait, for the love of Jesus (has Bob ever blown more of a wicked raspberry to his fans than that album title?), the table setter for an astonishing twenty-four tracks that Dylan fans in 1970 had to have been waiting for with the same enthusiasm as every other release, and what do we get? A group of ladies singing that one cryptic (or entirely banal, depending on your point of view) lyrics, billowing strings, and a sense that either Dylan's having himself a heck of a laugh or...well, Dylan's having himself one heck of a laugh. Could you imagine hearing this album for the first time back then and thinking "wait, this is what the whole album's gonna be like?" That must've blown a mind or two back in the day.

That lyric has attracted so much attention both because it's the simplest/dumbest/funniest one Dylan's ever wrote (and it's really only funny in context), and because it's one of the most basic examples of Dylanology you could possibly imagine. See, when he - excuse me, the ladies - sing "how'm I supposed to get any riding done?", they actually mean "writing", you see, and this album's mostly covers and all, and the originals are all not that great, so...boom! Self-analysis! Self-portrait! Mystery unlocked! I, of course, would like to think that Dylan did that on purpose, a way to send the Webermans of the world hunting for some MacGuffin, the same way that Lennon wrote "I Am The Walrus" to make the fringe Beatles fans geek out. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that's not true, and that the strict poker face Dylan maintained all throughout the album (that's one of the reasons this album has its reputation, I think - if the WHOLE thing was played for laughs that'd be one thing, but Dylan approaches so many of the tunes in a straightforward way that the only humor is of a black kind) was maintained here. I mean, think of if Dylan really did mean "riding" and the song's about, uh, horses. How terrible and pointless would that be? Better to make the myth come true so we can print that myth, right?

The song, like all the good songs on this album, works better in complete isolation, perhaps shuffled between The Clash and Aimee Mann or something, or on a YouTube video like the one I posted above. Freed from the constraints of the album and its all-encompassing reputation, the strengths of this track are so much easier to digest. Much like "Good Night", the lullaby finale to The Beatles' masterpiece (also a track with lush orchestration and simple lyrics), "All The Tired Horses" is a gently beautiful piece of music, something that can lull you to sleep with a smile upon your face. And as much as I appreciate the fact that it holds pole position on the album that it does and that Dylan was clearly challenging his listeners with this song (though not in the way he had before), I think it might be better to think of the song as that kind of beautiful lullaby, as a gorgeous little tune with no aspirations other than to be a gorgeous little tune. Would that the rest of this album sounded like this song, so we could think of the whole thing as gorgeous little tunes.

*I'd originally written "Brooklyn" - my friend Jeff did/does sound work for them, and he lives in Brooklyn, so that's where the mistake came from.

EBDS Special Post #4: The Isle of Wight Festival, 1969

2009-07-18T10:48:00.001-07:00

Special note: this post also encompasses Bob Dylan Songs #136, #141, #145, and #146. Four songs knocked off the massive mountain that is Self Portrait. Hooray!

PS: This sucker is LONG. Just a heads up.

And there we were, all in one place...a generation, lost in space...

...and freakin' Bob Dylan passed up our massive festival of peace and love to perform on a tiny ass island in freakin' GREAT BRITAIN two weeks later!

We've heard about why Bob Dylan chose to perform his first live show in three years, his first appearance in front of a concert audience since his self-imposed hiatus, and yet the very fact that Dylan stepped on that stage in Wootton with The Band is something of a mystery. Wikipedia tells us that Dylan was swayed by playing in the area of England where Lord Alfred Tennyson penned his immortal prose, and as a man of artistic and pretentious leanings, that seems easy to believe. Dylan's also made no secret of his disdain of the hippie community and his reticence to perform at a show basically in his backyard (in fact, it's been intimated that the site was chosen with Dylan in mind), and that almost certainly played a part in the proceedings as well. But that still only begins to tell the tale of Dylan's Isle of Wight '69 concert, a part of his mighty career that has been almost pushed into the shadows, a massive bit of history rendered practically obscure today.

About 150,000 people were there on that night in August when Dylan stepped back on the stage, performed a rather perfunctory set (the bootleg length comes out to less than one hour - remember, he was headlining this baby), and immediately retreated once again for five more years. That retreat might seem obvious in retrospect, given how the performance was received and is regarded these days (along with Dylan, perhaps, still in "family first" mode and only doing this performance with the strict agreement that it'd be a one-off), but anecdotal evidence suggests that Dylan was pleased with his performance after the show. Not everybody in that audience shared his opinion - there was booing when Dylan ended his set so early, and as I've stated, reviews of the show even immediately after were mixed at best. Still, there had been plans of an official live release (which is why Self Portrait has a few tracks from the show - might as well flesh that baby out with some stuff from the vaults), and it's hard to imagine The Band would've said no to a full-scale tour afterwards, even in the Nashville Skyline style of that particular show. It certainly would've been interesting to see how Dylan would've handled the rest of his catalog in that format.

Instead, no tour ever materialized, Dylan moved away from the country format for good, and we have only a fascinating one-off to make us wonder what might have been. So, forty years after the fact, I think it's worth popping on the show, giving it a thorough listening, and finding out for certain just what the 1969 Isle of Wight show was all about. Who knows, maybe a few of those myths and legends might be proven false...or absolutely true. All comments are made more or less in real time - I haven't heard this concert in years, and am listening more or less blind for a fuller experience. Here goes nothing...

TRACK 1: SHE BELONGS TO ME (BOB DYLAN SONG #146)

0:00 - Applause. You can't really tell how big the crowd is.

0:22 - The song immediately kicks off, much more up-tempo than usual. Dylan's country voice is right there, even more jarring than on Nashville Skyline, by dint of Dylan singing a non-country song. For whatever reason, the song starts with the 2nd verse - either that's just how Bob wanted it, or the tape had a cut there. Either way, a weird beginning to the show.

0:53 - Not that I'm some sort of voice coach, but Dylan's pitch is just all over the place. That's not surprising, given that it's hard to unlearn years of singing songs in a particular way, but worth noting.

1:29 - An off-mic shout leads into a Robertson solo. The Band have acquitted themselves nicely to this style (no big surprise), with Helm's drumming and the Manuel/Hudson combo standing out in particular. All the same, does anybody really think of "She Belongs To Me" as the type of song suitable for a good ol' down home jamboree?

2:15 - Levon Helm's shouting always puts a smile on my face.

2:18 - An indicator of the kind of mood the gang's in tonight - somebody yells "one more time!" and Dylan/Helm repeat the "for Halloween buy her a trumpet" refrain. A very showmanlike move, wouldn't you say?

2:37 - Amidst audience applause, various Band members say "nice to be here", then Dylan steps up with his only bit of interaction with the crowd - "Thank you very much. Nice to be here. Sure is." It's no "I'm wearing my Bob Dylan mask" or "this song's dedicated to the Taj Mahal", I can tell you that much.

TRACK 2: I THREW IT ALL AWAY

0:09 - A smattering of appreciative applause as Dylan sings the first lines. What are you people doing? This is a collection of trite cliches! Stop applauding!

0:37 - Interesting - Dylan repeats "I threw it all away" at the end of the chorus and the band plays a quick little extra bar of music. The tapers give an odd little chuckle at this.

1:28 - No repeat of the above moment after the 2nd chorus. Even more interesting.

1:50 - Dylan's being really experimental with his vocal patterns in the middle eight, messing around with the tempo of his singing and sort of playing around with what key he's in.

2:16 - It should be mentioned that this song is being played at a slower tempo than on the album, allowing for a more dramatic performance all around. Robertson's guitar is being deployed all over the place, most notably in the final ending sequence, where the more gentle acoustic (or mandolin?) being played is replaced by some choice soloing. It sounds pretty darn good, all in all.

TRACK 3: MAGGIE'S FARM

0:13 - After a quiet acoustic strumming from Bob (who, I think, had an acoustic all performance long, which is another noteworthy fact in and of itself), the song kicks to life in skronky bar-band fashion. For those of you that ever heard the Woody Guthrie tribute performance, that's basically how this song sounds - it would have fit in perfectly next to "Grand Coulee Dam".

0:41 - A nice little touch - after Dylan sings an iteration of the "I ain't gonna work with Maggie's (x) no more" line, Helm and Danko join in with "no more, no more" refrains. It would've sounded terrible in any other arrangement, but here it works really great. One wishes this had shown up on Self Portrait instead of...well, we'll get to that later.

2:08 - Dylan forgets a line in the "Maggie's ma" verse. Unfortunately, we'll get to THAT later as well.

2:27 - Here's where the song really roars to life - Hudson's organ plays with circus-like intensity, and Robertson matches him step for step. I have to say, The Band can really bring it when they want to.

3:16 - This is one of my favorite performances of the whole show, and one reason to me why this iteration of Dylan would've made for a great tour. We all loved those Woody Guthrie tribute performances, right? How much different are those than what Dylan's doing here? If the '68 Dylan/Band duo would've been great out on tour, wouldn't this version have done just as well?

4:00 - Dylan tunes up the acoustic for a short solo set.

TRACK 4: WILD MOUNTAIN THYME

0:00 - Eric Clapton had some very nice things to say about this show, saying that it was fantastic and "you'd have to be a musician to understand it"; I'm not sure if that's true, but Clapton was a noted fan of this era, so who knows. One thing's for sure - this performance gives a lot of truth to that statement.

0:20 - I just adore the way Dylan sings "wild mountain thyme" here. This is by far Dylan's best vocal performance of the show; hell, I'd say it's one of his best vocal performances of the 60s. He does this song absolute justice.

1:20 - This performance is proof positive, if you ever needed it, that Dylan has great respect for his predecessors. We all know how much Dylan revered ancient folk music, but never really got to hear it before (unless you count him ripping off all those melodies, of course). Well, here he is, performing an old English folk tune, singing it as respectfully as he can, turning in a gorgeous rendition.

2:33 - Very appreciative applause. Dylan threw them a bone, and they loved it.

TRACK 5: IT AIN'T ME, BABE

0:52 - Dylan plays around with the arrangement here - holding a note or two longer than usual, throwing in a few odd chords after the "you say you're looking for someone" part. Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't quite sound right. Sometimes experimentation doesn't always work for the best.

2:06 - One of the main criticisms of this show is that Dylan's just mailing it in, that he sounds sleepy at times and downright lazy and preoccupied at others. While I think that's more a by-product of Dylan's country style and something that a) isn't really that bad and b) would've been worked out with more performances in this vein, I suppose it's this performance that could lend that criticism credence; it's a little disappointing to hear Dylan flatten out his delivery after the last track. He's not singing badly, by any means - but there's no real spark here.

2:13 - Dylan, almost like he forgot the chords, plays some weird bit of business on the acoustic. What was that about?

3:05 - A funny ending, as Dylan sings "it ain't me you're looking...for" and stretches that last word out. Maybe I'm wrong, but it kinda sounds like a vaudeville moment, something you might hear at the end of a barbershop quartet performance. I'm thinking of Bugs Bunny singing "good evening, friends" by way of reference.

TRACK 6: TO RAMONA

0:05 - More applause for this song - but how strange is it that this song made the setlist? Don't get me wrong, I like the song just fine, but it's sort of like when "Spanish Harlem Incident" showed up at the Philharmonic Hall show. An idiosyncratic choice, to say the least; then again, would you expect anything less?

1:10 - It's kind of gratifying to hear Dylan bringing a manner of vocal tics to this performance, as though he's trying to make this version of the song truly his. If you get my meaning.

2:19 - And as this song ends, without any hesitation Bob leads right into...

TRACK 7: MR. TAMBOURINE MAN

0:00 - ...which gets the most recognition applause so far.

1:10 - Dylan more or less plays this song the same way he would when he'd air it out on Tour '74, playing the song up-tempo and letting the words cascade so quickly that they almost trip over each other. Whether you like that is entirely up to you; I'm still marveling over Country Dylan having these words coming out of his mouth.

2:05 - A quick word about Dylan's sartorial splendor - for this show he came out wearing a cream suit (not unlike the Armani beauties the '96 Liverpool side sported before the FA Cup, for those readers across the pond), with a thin beard and short hair. A pretty cool ensemble, to be sure, but probably not what anybody was expecting or hoping for. No wonder so many think of this show as a letdown - from the moment he walked out, he was setting everybody up for that.

3:03 - The song ends here. I'll repeat - "Mr. Tambourine Man" ends here. The Band now comes back out for the rest of the set.

TRACK 8: I DREAMED I SAW ST. AUGUSTINE

0:21 - Dylan plays this song slowed down, giving Robertson another venue to spin off some laid-back guitar work. We get several feedback squalls - I wonder if the, um, unique microphone setup had anything to do with that?

2:10 - In lieu of talking about a fine, but otherwise unmemorable performance, I'd like to point out just how remarkably eclectic Dylan's setlist was this night. Sure, we got a smattering of the big hits, but take a look - five songs from his last two albums (compared to six from the Electric Trilogy - and one of those was "Mr. Tambourine Man"!), nothing from before 1964, a Basement Tapes song nobody's heard yet, a folk cover, "Minstrel Boy" (!), more songs from Another Side than Blonde on Blonde, and so on. For a one-off show, Dylan was not afraid to dig into his catalog and play what he wanted to, rather than what he felt should be played. Contrast that with just about every other tour since (including Tour '74, which basically took the opposite tack of this show). Perhaps knowing it was just the one show gave Dylan the sense of freedom to experiment this way.

TRACK 9: LAY LADY LAY

0:12 - One of the big disappointments of the concert; the gentle, light-hearted version on the album is replaced with something more leaden and ham-handed. I can't really put my finger on why - Helm does a good job replicating the quick-step drum arrangement, and the organ's out in fine force. But for whatever reason, what sounded joyous on record sounds thudding here. Maybe it's the chorus that hurts it; everyone opts for too much noise, instead of a lighter touch, and the song suffers for it.

2:10 - Case in point - the middle eight. Dylan almost howls his way through the lines, and the Band, all banged-out bar chords and lumbering rhythm, gives the song no sympathy at all. It's kinda hard to hear. The burst of feedback at 2:19 is no help, either.

3:21 - The song finally staggers to a close. Not a good outing; the '74 versions, while nothing like the single, are polished enough to actually sound better.

TRACK 10: HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED

0:05 - Already a surprise - Robertson cranks out wicked solos to replace the police whistle from the original version. The Band's coming out swinging here, that's for sure.

1:12 - This is where the "bar band" style fits in best; Dylan somehow manages to adopt his croon into something more vicious, Helm & Co. roar out the last line of every verse with gusto, and the group cranks out a particular acidic brand of rock here. This is about as much fun as this concert got.

2:31 - Hudson's organ really gets a chance to shine here. A few more hip-swingers like this, and we'd have a lot less complaints about this show.

TRACK 11: ONE TOO MANY MORNINGS

0:05 - About as mellow an arrangement as we ever got for this song; none of the slow-boiling energy of the 1966 version, none of the quiet longing of the album version. Dylan draws out the "thousand miles behind" line in a way he never would again. Not much to say about this version - it's not bad, but not great.

2:00 - While we're here, I'd like to mention that 3 of the 4 Beatles were actually in the audience; Paul, who was definitely persona non grata after the Get Back debacle, was not there. Harrison waxed rhapsodic about the performance; John's more measured quote has entered legend - "he gave a reasonable, if slightly flat performance; still, people were acting like they were expecting Jesus, or Godot, to appear". I think that's still the prevalent view regarding this show - the expectations were way too high to ever be met, and Dylan going the country route wasn't going to help matters. Again, it's worth wondering if a full tour of this type of show would have helped matters, or if Dylan hadn't chosen such a massive venue to try this style of music. Alas, we'll never know.

TRACK 12: I PITY THE POOR IMMIGRANT

0:00 - If you're still reading this, congrats.

0:01 - The song starts mid-line, which is probably just a terrible edit. It sounds like somebody might be playing an accordian; perhaps it's actually an organ with a different tone. Either way, it sounds really good in the context of the song.

0:58 - Robertson plays a type of solo here that sounds like the rippling notes he'd use for the Tour '74 "LARS" solo, and will do the same later. Kind of interesting.

1:35 - Just a note from the video - look at how Dylan's playing his guitar. Is he even making contact with the strings?

2:00 - Aside from the group stirring to life during the choruses, this is a rather lugubrious reading of this song. Considering how late it was when Dylan stepped on stage (it went from August 31st to September 1st as the show progressed), couldn't he have whipped out a few quicker numbers? It's not like The Band wouldn't have been suitable for it...

TRACK 13: LIKE A ROLLING STONE (BOB DYLAN SONG #136)

0:01 - Yes, the peak moment of the show, when Bob busts out his big hit (and why it didn't close, I'll never understand). So how does this version stack up to what everybody had to have been thinking about - either the 1966 version or the original? Read on?

0:34 - Bob blows the "you used to laugh about" line. Not a good sign.

0:48 - The backup vocals sound out of place; strange, since they sounded fine in '74, but they definitely do here. The arrangement sounds close to the single version, although the mid-tempo trot is definitely different, and The Band sound like they've only had perfunctory rehearsal (which they may very well have had). The "bar band" thing works for fun rockers, not for majestic pieces of work like this one.

2:04 - Another blown line. Jesus, Bob, it's "LIKE A ROLLING STONE", for Pete's sake!

3:05 - And now we skip the "you never turn around to see the frowns" verse. I mean, is he TRYING to annoy the crowd at this point? At least he doesn't blow any more lines here.

3:47 - Here's an odd moment - Dylan sings the word "refuse" and sounds almost exactly like Van Morrison. Hmm.

4:53 - And that's it. Not a total travesty, but certainly not worthy of inclusion on any album, even one like Self Portrait. You'd have thought rehearsals would've made the performance less ramshackle and allowed Bob to remember all the lines, but apparently not. I feel vaguely dirty.

4:56 - This was the end of the first set, right? That, at least, would make some sense.

TRACK 14: I'LL BE YOUR BABY TONIGHT

0:14 - Well, if Bob & Co. wanted to wash the bad taste out of everyone's mouth, they do a darn good job with this version. The backup versions now sound more fun than misplaced, the mid-tempo arrangement suits the song perfectly, and Dylan's country vocal is maybe what the song should have had all along. The perfect song for all the hippies in the audience to discreetly light up a doob.

1:25 - Dylan and Helm sound like they've having way too much fun with the "bring that bottle over here" line. That put a smile on my face.

2:46 - As the song wraps up, it's worth wondering how more Nashville Skyline songs would've been received. Would the reputation of this show have dipped further? Or would more people have appreciated hearing the songs in a live context that would've allowed them to stand out? It's interesting to ponder.

TRACK 15: QUINN THE ESKIMO (THE MIGHTY QUINN) (BOB DYLAN SONG #141)

0:01 - Everybody comes charging out, guns blazing. I've gone on record saying this version is my favorite "Mighty Quinn" out there, and I stand by it. The low-key original has a lot to go for it, but what it has is nothing compared to the high-octane performance here.

1:27 - Dylan's "whoa, guitar!" shout before another pointed Robertson solo might be the most emotion he summons throughout the whole show, other than the whole of "Wild Mountain Thyme". By the way, if you never hear this show, I urge you to at least seek that track out. It is a beauty.

2:26 - It really is great that a spot of prime real estate was given to a Basement Tapes track, of all things. Not only is the version fun as heck, but it's a sly wink to the more in-tune cognoscenti in the audience. You have to love that. Of the four songs from this show on Self Portrait, this might be the one I'm most glad made the cut.

TRACK 16: MINSTREL BOY (BOB DYLAN SONG #145)

0:01 - Some really great harmonies on the choruses, I should point out.

0:35 - You wonder who the "Lucky" is that Bob's singing about here; not only is the song called "Minstrel Boy" (like a singer, you know?), but he mentions a "Mighty Mockingbird" and even goes into first person at the end ("...but I'm still on that road"). Was this song written to deliberately tease us poor souls?

2:44 - This is a pretty good song, make no mistake. It has a sweet chord progression, a fantastically sung chorus, and some really interesting lyrics about loneliness and burdens. And somehow, it makes sense that it's on the grab bag that is Self Portrait - the song really wouldn't have fit anywhere else. Too bad it had to be a jewel in a dung heap.

TRACK 17: RAINY DAY WOMEN #12 & 35

0:01 - A definite crowd-pleasing way to end the show; the song cuts off at 1:01 on every version, so I can't really say much more than that. Everybody has a grand ol' time singing the lyrics, the Band rides shotgun behind that now-famous riff, and that's pretty much that.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Talk about a work in progress. You could see that Dylan and The Band hadn't quite figured out what would work and what wouldn't; there was too much emphasis on slow songs, not enough thought into what older songs would work in the country vein, and moments that were outright painful. On the other hand, when things clicked, they really clicked - Dylan proved he could adopt that croon in a different environment, the raucous rockers were energetic and fun, and some of the arrangements were quite inspired. This could have been the start of a very special chapter in Bob's career. Instead, we just have the first chapter of a book never written. Such is life.

Thanks for reading, if you made it to the end. Coming up next - the weird, wild, and not particularly wonderful world of Self Portrait. We'll soon see what stern stuff I'm made of, won't we?

Bob Dylan Song #124: Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

2009-07-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

Author's note (boy, I've had a lot of those recently, haven't I?): Keep reading below the post for two special announcements, one regarding the next post, and one regarding the blog's future.

Maybe it's those opening bars, with the pedal steel guitar coming together beautifully with a really cool piano line. Maybe it's the oddly thick guitar notes played all throughout the song. Maybe it's the funky middle eight, that pedal steel soaring to great heights and Dylan hitting the high notes in a way that suggests that some real skill does go into his vocal performances. Or perhaps it's just the way the song written, a few simple chords arranged perfectly into a gorgeous and fitting closer to the album. Whatever the reason, "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" stands as my favorite song on Nashville Skyline, one of my favorite closers to any album, and a song that I would put on a Dylan mixtape for somebody trying to explore further into Dylan's massive body of work. It's a sentimental favorite, what can I say.

For one thing, "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" boasts probably my favorite musical arrangement on the album, on an album that's chock full of fun musical moments (even "Nashville Skyline Rag", with its fun banjo work, has something to be said for it). That pedal steel, an instrument that almost immediately conjures up country music whenever you hear it, is used here to devastating effect, swooping between Dylan's lines and adding extra emphasis when he's not singing. And the piano adds an extra sweet counterpoint, like a musical flourish at the start and end of the track. People tend to make a lot about how simplistic country music tends to be, and while I don't disagree with many of the complaints (modern country music, in particular, doesn't seem to have much going for it), there is still a great deal to like in the best of country, just like in the best of any genre. And one thing that I've always enjoyed, even with crappy country music, is its differences in instrumentation, with pedal steel guitars, violins, banjos, and other things you don't always hear in music coming to the forefront. It's almost like hearing a different language, and that's always cool.

The other thing that I've found interesting about this song, especially as I get older, is the actual subject matter of the song. What Dylan's singing about, and I never really thought of it when I first heard it, is a tale of a man who is apparently visiting some town or whatever, has fallen in love with a woman there, and now has decided to give up his train ticket (I always liked that "if there's a poor boy on the street" line) in order to stay with his newly beloved and do all sorts of things not actually mentioned in the lyrics. That's a take on the love song you don't always hear; it's not a tale of a devoted relationship, nor is it simply about a one-night stand with some girl the narrator will never see again. Instead, you have Dylan singing about actually having what was supposed to be a one night stand, and becoming so enamored with the woman in question that he's prepared to chuck everything in his life ("throw my troubles out the door") in order to just stay with this woman. That's kind of sweet, isn't it?

It's somewhat educational to compare the album take of this song with the version played on the Rolling Thunder Revue's first leg, as heard on the official Live 1975 album. Whereas this version aims for a sort of modest declaration of love, the RTR's version comes on far more strong (as evidenced by the "you came down on me like rolling thunder" line, which Dylan always sang with a great deal of panache) and packs a more overwhelmingly sexual punch. Of course, the arrangements have a lot to do with that, as the 1975 version swaps out the pedal steel and piano for roaring guitars and Scarlet Rivera's bewitching violin (along with a lot more shouting), and Dylan had rewritten the lyrics to give the song a totally different energy. The narrator in this new version is more insistent of his desire ("you got to understand/that tonight I'll be staying here with you...get ready!") and seems a lot less innocent ("I could have left this town by noon/by tonight I'd been to some place new"), almost like Dylan was inserting his current touring incarnation into the song rather than the random traveler/businessman/whoever of the album version. It's the same song, but with a whole other meaning behind it.

We can be thankful, then, that Dylan kept that sexual energy latent or completely absent in the album version. The kind of blatant come-hither aura that permeates the RTR's version (and the RTR in general, really) would have been incredibly out of place in the pastoral setting that Nashville Skyline resides in. Instead, we have a take that still exudes joyfulness, but in a much more innocent way. It's a charming ending to a charming album, maybe the most charming Bob ever recorded.

Okay, so.

First, a word about the next entry in the blog. I'm already starting to break out in hives thinking about starting up the Self Portrait series, so before I delve into that album I'm going to do something rather more fun. We all know about Dylan's performance at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival with The Band, an unexpected and often overlooked moment in his career. Recently a new version of the concert tape surfaced in the trading community, a definite step up over the barely listenable Frankenstein's monster that was the original version. And, in the interest of giving more attention to a strange part of Dylan's canon, I'm going to be listening to the show and writing up my own running diary, to be posted on this site. I urge all of you to download the show, pull up the diary on Monday, and follow along with me as I give you my thoughts about a truly unique show. Join me, won't you?

And now, a word about me. I would say about 99.99% of the readers of this blog don't know me personally, and so none of you would really have an idea as to what I do when I'm not writing this blog. Well, starting in August I will be attending the University of San Diego School of Law, giving up three years of my life in the hopes of "making something of myself" (he says with a wry smile). I bring this up not just because it'd be cool to meet any readers from San Diego, but also because I'm not entirely sure how this will affect this little project I've undertaken. Now, lest you think I'm saying goodbye a mere decade into Dylan's career, fear not - I will still be making posts and reading comments and so on. This blog is not going away. However, whether or not I'll still be posting at the same clip...that I don't know. I might be going to one entry a week, maybe one entry a month. Okay, definitely not one entry a month - I'd like to finish this project before I pass on. But the chances that I continue to provide the same amount of content every week seem slim. At any rate, I wanted to let you all know in advance. I'm still continuing the blog, and I hope you still continue reading and commenting.

Bob Dylan Song #123: Country Pie

2009-07-14T05:44:00.000-07:00

I was sorely tempted to just post live videos of "Country Pie", much like I did for the "Nashville Skyline Rag" post, but it was probably pushing it to do it the one time. Besides, Lord knows that there are times where I have to dig deep to find things to talk about with some of these tunes; "Nashville Skyline Rag" really doesn't inspire much outside of "hey, an instrumental", so it seemed better to just have a little bit of fun. "Country Pie", essentially, serves the same function as "NSR" does; a lighthearted piece of music, essentially the equivalent of what you'd play at a hoedown or hootenanny or some other word for country-music dance, and a bookend for the end of the album the same way that other song works as bookend for the start. The major difference is that "Country Pie" has lyrics, which allows it to fall in for more scrutiny, certainly way more than it deserves. "NSR", just a quick two-minute banjo showcase, ultimately gets taken off the hook. "Country Pie", which might as well be an instrumental for the depth of its lyrics (although "Lil' Jack Horner got nothing on me" is worth a smile), doesn't get let off that easy.

This is stepping on something I'd like to get into more in-depth down the line, but one of the topics Greil Marcus gets into in his infamous review of Self Portrait is the idea of Dylan's past work giving him the freedom of creativity. As Marcus puts it, Dylan basically created an entire legend out the body of work he created between 1965 and 1966, music that "defined and structured a crucial year" - you would think Dylan's tremendous acoustic work beforehand would fit in to that legend as well, but never mind. And, by dint of that legend, Dylan basically has been afforded the privilege of being able to record whatever he wants to, essentially trading on the goodwill afforded him from his previous work, regardless of whether or not it has any merit. To quote again, he "doesn't have to do good, because he has done good. One wonders...how long he can get away with it". And while he's not talking about Nashville Skyline, you can certainly imagine him tossing it in along with the rest of Dylan's "disappointing" post-1966 output (it'd be nice to ask 1970 Marcus what he thought of John Wesley Harding, but that would probably bring on another judgmental rant, so perhaps it's best that can never happen). Songs like "Country Pie", a little lark to say the least, probably don't help matters.

Now, I can certainly fill up an entire post talking about this little bit of sermonizing Marcus saw fit to give us (to be fair, it was a different time that Marcus wrote that in), but I'd prefer to save that and just concentrate on this one song, one that I happen to like and consider a fun ol' time. A song like this one, surely, would be considered by 1970 Marcus to be another instance of trading on goodwill, Dylan simply having himself a goof because he can. And, of course, he's absolutely right. To which the obvious rejoinder, one that you might actually have in your mind right now, is "so what?" The great thing about those fantastic albums, the ones that made Dylan the man that he was in 1969, was that they didn't have any ambitions of turning Dylan into some sort of Greek god or giving him a reputation as Jesus with a six-string (and the fact that they did clearly made him uncomfortable); you never got the feeling that Dylan set out to deliberately make music that would cause the earth to move. And those albums had their share of less-than-amazing music, like all classic albums do - not to mention songs clearly meant to put a smile on the listener's face like "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" or "Absolutely Sweet Marie". Dylan has a sense of humor about himself, and a showman's desire to entertain. "Country Pie" showcases both of those traits, but does it in a more direct way, and thus is not worthy of praise. I don't see how that works.

One of the more surprising moments of Dylan's latter-day touring career was in around 2000 or so, when for whatever reason "Country Pie" started getting semi-regular airings on stage. Usually clocking in at a brisk 2 and a half minutes or so, the song generally works as a chance for the band to strut its stuff (Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton, in particular, get to whip up some fiery guitar solo) and get the audience movin' and groovin'. Not only is that a cool thing - it's not exactly as though Dylan's catalog is chock full of dance songs - but it illustrates what a song like "Country Pie" can be under the right circumstances. I've written any number of words about Nashville Skyline being an album that shows that Dylan can appeal to our heart and feet, just as much as he could appeal to our brain. To close this post out, I think I'll let Dylan and His Band do the work for me.

Bob Dylan Song #122: Tell Me That It Isn't True

2009-07-12T09:36:00.000-07:00

Author's note: My original post was accidentally deleted, so I'm more or less stitching this together from memory. With any luck, it's better than the original.

One of the more gratifying aspects of Dylan's career, so diverse and full of albums that sound remarkably different from each other, is that any number of his albums can grab your attention for long periods of time and not let go until you've fully exhausted the joys of that particular song cycle. While this type of obsessive listening can lend itself to adverse results (for a while I'd pegged Desire as Dylan's best album, whereas today I don't even consider it the best representation of that era in Dylan's career), on the whole that sort of nonstop listening can prove to be truly rewarding. As you might expect, I bring this up because I spent the first week or two after my first time hearing Nashville Skyline cueing it up again and again, pulled in by its hit-and-run brevity (one can make too much of this, but let's face it - this album is great at 27 minutes and would be interminable at 54), the catchy tunes, and that (in)famous croon. How can it not be such a weird standout, especially if you start with the Electric Trilogy or BOTT like just about everyone else?

A song that caught my attention from the first time was this one, "Tell Me That It Isn't True", a song that I still enjoy to this day. It has one of the best intros on the album, a gently rising guitar line backed up by some really nice organ work (the organ playing throughout is a real standout on the album, understated yet always well-deployed). Some of the best lyrics of the album can be found here, with Dylan's narrator quietly pleading for his woman to affirm that the rumors of her infidelity are false and that she really is faithful to him. And the band arrangement, gently adding emphasis to Dylan's singing (mainly aided, again, by that organ), is as good as it gets here. For an album that boasts a strong internal consistency as one of its strengths, in that the songs all suggest each other without sounding like each other (if that makes sense), this is one of the songs that helps hold that consistency in place. It's not a stone cold classic like "Lay Lady Lay", but it's well worth the listen.

It occurs to me, as the Nashville Skyline series winds down, that one of the main talking points of this album is also one of the most ultimately irrelevant. I'm talking, of course, about Dylan's voice on this album, the high-pitched singing style he'd adopted for these ten (well, nine) songs alone and would only adopt once more, for his shambolic joke of a cover of Paul Simon's "The Boxer". It's always been debated as to where that voice came from - be it a side-effect of quitting smoking, or a conscious reverting to his singing voice from 1960, or whatever it is. But I think that concentrating on where the voice came from kind of obscures the main question - why that voice came to be. I touched on this earlier, but that question seems to have an obvious answer, as well as an important one. I'll put it like this - imagine a song like "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?", with its vicious barbs towards some poor fictional (?) woman, and imagine it in the smooth Nashville Skyline voice. Now take "Tell Me That It Isn't True" and try to hear it in Dylan's sandpaper and grit snarl from Highway 61 Revisited. It just doesn't sound right, does it? Just as the lyrical styles are so very different - if "Tell Me That It Isn't True" had been written in 1965, the woman's infidelity would not even be a question - the voices Dylan used to sing those lyrics matches so very well. You want rough edges for 1965 Dylan's poetic slings and arrows, and you want baby skin-smooth sounds to match 1969 Dylan's charming, folksy words.

For an album that, lyrically, appears to have no preconceptions or hidden motives, it also shows a remarkable amount of self-awareness on Bob's part. He knew perfectly well that nobody would accept the Dylan that sneered his way through "Positively Fourth Street" singing songs about laying in a big brass bed or throwing his suitcase out the window. And he also knew that his regular voice had no antecedent in country music's already-rich history to that point, and any country fans that picked up this album would be instantly turned off if they heard "I Threw It All Away" in even the less-rough vocalizing found on John Wesley Harding. So Bob reached into his bag of tricks, pulled out a vocal style that he'd either never or very rarely tried before, and used it to his absolute advantage. It is that singing style that stands as the absolute hallmark of this album, and that is because the singing style works so very well. Kudos to Dylan for taking that chance, and making it work for him.

Bob Dylan Song #121: One More Night

2009-07-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

"One More Night", like the other songs on this album (with the possible exception of "Girl of the North Country"), is the type of song that could have been recorded by any great country artist and would have sounded just fine. Note that I didn't say "any country artist" - there is enough poetry and rhythm in the way Dylan stitched the lyrics together to make it virtually impossible for some hack to write and perform the song the way Dylan did on Nashville Skyline. But the original point still stands; this is a song that paints a universal sentiment, more or less removing what we'd consider Dylan's own original voice from the equation. It's this removing of his voice that is usually the bane of contention when it comes to this album, where Dylan's usage of the occasional cliche and the more common impersonal phrase gives the album more distance than it should have, the equivalent of a great painting of some random landscape or a bowl of fruit or something. One wonders just how personal, say, "Gates of Eden" or "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" actually were, but that's a whole other post.

Let's assume that Dylan wasn't recording this album purely for any financial/career-linked considerations, and that he was genuinely interested in following that thread he suggested at the end of John Wesley Harding to its logical conclusion and exploring a genre of music that legitimately interested him. The question, then, is one that's been puzzling for a full four decades: why did Dylan choose to completely hide his writing voice? Putting aside the thorny issue of what exactly that voice actually is, we can reasonably state that whatever that voice is, it isn't anywhere to be found on the nine songs with vocals found on this album. Did Dylan really believe that there was no way to record a country album with any sense of "authenticity" (whatever THAT means) or "legitimacy" without sticking strictly to songs of love and the absence thereof? Why not any songs about growing up poor or running from the law? He's made up those stories before - would anybody really have called him out if he penned a few ditties on those subjects? And, most of all, why has Dylan "dumbed down" his approach to lyricism, giving us an album that could very well have been written by one of the country artists I mentioned in the initial post for this album, rather than the Bob Dylan we know and love?

Roger Ebert, who has been keeping up a blog that suggests he may have missed his true vocation when he decided to become a film critic, has posted a couple entries related to the steaming pile that is the second Transformers movie and his evisceration of a review for that particular dud. The most recent entry is a spirited discussion about our current cultural divide, where the educated and intellectual are derided nonstop for being "elitist", "snobby", and so on. Although Ebert stops just short of saying this, he also advances the notion that the great majority of the general population is of average intelligence and below, and tends to confront those in the other part of the spectrum with fear and disgust. He's right about this, of course. He also challenges people to keep their minds open and curious, to seek out higher forms of entertainment, and to never simply settle for big explosions and cheap jokes about poop or doing it. He's right about this, as well.

But there's something of an undercurrent to this argument that I think deserves some discussion. I'm not talking about the insanely trite "it's just entertainment" excuse that people have been chucking at Ebert; if you are willing to settle for lowest common denominator in that which stimulates and entertains you, where else will you be willing to lower the bar? I'm talking about the idea that the masses do need to be entertained, and that occasionally they will not want to be entertained by something that shakes us to our very core and makes us question God or the meaning of life or what have you. For most people, life is hard. Life is a constant struggle of doing work you probably don't like, living in a relationship that isn't always perfect, maybe having kids that give you migraine after migraine. The vast majority of Americans deal with traffic jams and 401(k)s, with going to McDonald's because they're too tired to cook, and with paying insane bills just so they can TiVO some Food Network show and watch it on Saturday when they have an hour to spare. And, these days, most Americans are dealing with a painfully crippled economy still struggling for signs of recovery. These Americans are, I'm sad to say, just not going to be appeased by The Seventh Seal or, yes, even by Blonde on Blonde, and the odds are good they never will be. Do they not have a right to be entertained?

Look, I think Michael Bay peddles a particularly odious brand of filmic garbage (no wonder Ebert, a man who has dedicated his life to great films, hates that movie so much), most music people download for ringtones tends to suck big time, and a certain amount of artistic power has to be present in even the lowest forms of entertainment for that entertainment to have any merit at all. I also think that too much can be made of this. People sometimes just want to laugh, just want to hear music that makes them happy, and so on. We don't have to make too much out of those impulses. Now, if ALL they want to do is just laugh or just listen to happy music or whatever, there's a problem. But emotions don't always have to be deep or thought-provoking.

That brings me to Nashville Skyline, an album that has sold its fair share of copies and somehow managed to entertain despite not reaching the same dizzying intellectual heights that Blonde on Blonde has. People like this album just fine, without pondering why Dylan's used such a nondescript lyrical voice or why the album wanders between all of two separate themes. And that, to me, is okay. Dylan, in recording this album, didn't worry about any snobs-against-the-slobs cultural war or being taken to task by people who'd already grasped what "It's Alright, Ma" is all about and now feel almost let down by an album that doesn't force us to approach it with that much brainpower. He wrote a bunch of songs that sounded good to him, recorded an album that he wanted to record, and that is that. A piece of art that simple doesn't need to be twisted around like some kind of Rubik's Cube. We can let it just be what it is.

Author's note: for the readers of this post that come via Expecting Rain, please note that if you go to the main page, below this entry is an article I wrote yesterday about Michael Jackson and what might appear to be a tangential, but I think is quite interesting connection to our man Bob. I invite you all to read and comment.