Bob Dylan Song #141: Take A Message To Mary

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. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #140: Take Me As I Am

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. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #139: The Boxer

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. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #138: Blue Moon

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? Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #137: Gotta Travel On

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. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #136: Copper Kettle

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. Read more!

Bob Dylan Song #135: Living the Blues

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

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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. Read more!