The Cultural Impresario

Reading

2011-12-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

This is the time of year I am blessed with a little time to read, so I've been plowing through Greil Marcus's Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 and a bit of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I'm about to start John Hodgman's That Is All. While reading each of those things, two passages in particular caught my eye.

With Marcus, the early stuff is really hit or miss, but starting in the 90s everything is magical. He elucidates late Dylan as well as anyone, and he has the strongest handle on Harry Smith that I know of, which is his true strength. The part of the book that really stuck out for me, though, was from a book review of a memoir by the Clash's least important member, Vince White. Marcus quotes the following passage from White:

"...a bus wasn't a bus. It was an obscene red metal object that moved down the street carrying blank faces that had come from nowhere and were going absolutely nowhere."

Of course, he's talking about buses -- literal buses. What he insists on, though, is that the bus, no matter how real it is, is really just a sign, and it signifies all sorts of things -- nostalgia, pollution, and a whole bag of other shit, but mostly social stratification. What this passage reminds me of is perhaps Ezra Pound's most famous poem, "In A Station of the Metro":

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
petals on a wet black bough.

The faces, moving so fast though the subway station, have features he can't make out in the dim light. They become, then, less-than-human once robbed of their individual identity. They are anonymous, with nothing to differentiate one from the other. Their life is that of the drone. White, most likely unintentionally, just gave the best interpretation of Pound that I've ever read.

The other bit I noticed when reading was in Whitman's "Song of Myself," section 20. Whitman has a greaty line that says "I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones." This is very similar in diction and content, and somewhat similar in syntax, to the like "I'm looking for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs" in Dylan's "Cry Awhile" on "Love and Theft."

Dylan Album Project: Christmas In the Heart

2011-12-24T03:00:00.000-08:00

Christmas In the Heart (2009)

When the news hit the street that Dylan would be releasing a Christmas album, most people thought it would be a joke. There were all sorts of rumors, including a rumor that persisted a little while afterwards that Dylan had actually written an album of Christmas originals but shelved them after not liking how they turned out. Despite people’s misgivings, and judging from online message boards many Dylan fans refuse to even listen to this album, sales went well. This topped the Christmas chart for several week. That is good, as all proceeds in perpetuity go to Feed America, Crisis UK, or the World Food Programme, depending on which country it is bought in. Also, the music is great. Dylan looks back to the golden age of Christmas music for inspiration, taking his lead from the original recordings of many of the iconic Christmas songs of the 40s and 50s, such as Dean Martin’s “Christmas Blues,” the Andrews Sisters’ “Christmas Island,” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” on which he shuns “hang a star upon the highest bough” for the original “we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” He balances these with traditional carols like “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Adeste Fidelis” (which he sings in Latin), and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman.”

In many ways, Dylan’s singing is better on this album than it has been in years, but I suspect that may be because the melodies to these songs are so deeply ingrained. Also, the musicianship is superb. David Hidalgo is back again, and joined this time by R&B guitarist Phil Upchurch, who has worked with jazz cats like Cannonball Adderly and Dizzy Gillespie, funk legends like Curtis Mayfield and Michael Jackson, to blues people like B. B. King and John Lee Hooker and doo-wop groups like The Dells and The Spaniels. All in all, a fine performance. The heavenly-sounding chorale is composed of a mix of singers, and includes the Ditty Bops, a great, underrated feminist folk-pop duo.

Best song: Here Comes Santa Claus – This was originally a Gene Autry song, and the steel guitar on Dylan’s version gives flourishes of the singing cowboy. What makes this song work, though, is what Dylan does right before the song ends. The last verse includes the lines “Peace on earth will come to all / if we just follow the light. / Let’s give thanks to the Lord above / cause Santa Claus comes tonight.” The last two lines are repeated thrice at the end of the song. The chorus sings the first line and then Dylan responds with the second, and adds a biting, sardonic tone to each word. The first three lines are about God, about the spirit of giving and about love. The last line is about greed and self-centeredness. By emphasizing these last two lines, the notion that we should thank Jesus for a bounty of gifts we truly buy ourselves, Dylan mocks them. The trade-off of vocals emphasizes this in two ways. First of all, there is the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness. The chorus epitomizes commonly held notions of what defines beautiful singing. Perfect pitch, perfect harmonies – they can’t be beat. Dylan’s ragged growl, even on songs where he tries to turn it into a sweet croon, does not. This suggests that the first line, belief in Jesus, is a beautiful thing, and that the second, the commercialization of Christmas, is ugly, and Dylan’s voice, which becomes particularly hard-edged on these last lines, seems to bear out this suggestion. The other dichotomy emphasized here is that between construction and reality. The chorus is constructed. Even if they are not edited with some sort of software or studio trickery, they have been selected to create this ideal meld, and certainly take after take has been taken to get the exact sound desired. Dylan, on the other hand, is raw and ragged; he hasn’t been modified, or at least if he has he does not sound it. The artificiality associated with the sound of the chorus suggests that, at least in society, the message of Jesus rings hollow. Those who proselytize it don’t live it. Instead, the focus is placed on people’s very real desire for material objects, an obsession which is represented by Santa. The end result is that people in general tend to value the hollow as beautiful while their true desires are ugly. The ugliness of these desires, and the attraction to the hollowness, undermines the song’s upbeat demeanor. I don’t think Dylan is out to denigrate the song or the holiday, but I do feel as though the song, at least in my experience with it, sets up this powerful tension that suggests our own consumption is killing our faith by degrees.

Worst song: The First Noel – Around 2:09 the voice just falls apart. Dylan doesn’t have much to begin with nowadays, and too many Christmas songs have a range that just doesn’t work for him.

Dylan Album Project: Together Through Life

2011-12-23T10:37:00.001-08:00

Together Through Life (2009)

Oliver Dahan, who directed the Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose, which Dylan is purportedly a fan of, asked Dylan to write the score for My Own Love Song, a roadtrip drama with Renee Zellweger and Lawrence Fishburne. Dylan wrote up a song called “Life Is Hard” and, en route to recording it, met up with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead, who he enlisted for help to write the lyrics to the rest of the tracks. Dylan and Hunter had previously worked together for two songs on Down In the Groove. When they left the studios, not only had Dylan recorded two or three songs with vocals for the film, as well as several instrumental tracks, but also recorded a whole album of new material, almost all of it co-written with Hunter.

Together Through Life is alright if you don’t take it too seriously, and don’t expect anything too heady. After the last several Dylan albums, which were filled with deep meditation, this mostly breezy jaunt is only meant to be fun. It isn’t meant to be shallow I don’t think, though it is, but once you accept that you can find some things to like. “I Feel A Change Comin’ On” was one of two songs previewed before the album’s release, and from the title people expected a comment on the state of the nation, and much has been made of lines about walking with the priest and “the fourth part of the day” already being gone. This is the deepest song on the album probably, but I think its just a love song, and one with a nice feel to it. “If You Ever Go To Houston” is a fine extension of “Wanted Man,” a song Dylan wrote for Johnny Cash and never recorded himself. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” includes the most effective use of horns in a Dylan song and “Forgetful Heart” is richly ominous, even if it leaves you wanting for more. Also, the playing is fine throughout, featuring David Hidalgo (of Los Lobos) on accordion and Mike Campbell (of the Heartbreakers) on guitar.

Best song: Shake, Shake Mama – Based on a Mance Lipscomb song of the same name, Dylan took the verse about Judge Simpson out of Canterbury Tales. In addition to the tightest groove in any Dylan 12-bar blues, this song also features several hilarious blues couplets.

Worst song: Life Is Hard – The lyric is nearly just a list of clichés, the melody is tired, and Dylan shouldn’t even be attempting to hit those high notes.

Live version: Forgetful Heart – On the record, you can imagine this song working well life, and it does. The record has a more pronounced presence of the bass, while the live version makes more use of the violin, courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, previously of BR-549.

Rhymes: this/exist (“My Wife’s Hometown”); forevermore/door (“Forgetful Heart”); spark/dark (“Jolene”); stuff/rough (“Shake, Shake Mama”); east/priest; James Joyce/voice (“I Feel A Change Comin’ On”)

Images: “boulevards of broken cars” (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”); “your gun-belt tight;” “a restless fever burnin’ in my brain” (“If You Ever Go To Houston”); “a curtained gloom” (“This Dream of You”); “cop cars blinking” (“It’s All Good”)

Axioms: “hell’s my wife’s hometown” (“My Wife’s Hometown”); “if you want to live easy, baby pack your clothes with mine;” “dreams never did work for me anyway, even when they did come true;” “I got the blood of the land in my voice” (“I Feel a Change Comin’ On”); “a teacup of water is enough to drown” (“It’s All Good”)

Dylan Album Project: Modern Times

2011-12-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

Modern Times (2006)

In the grand cultural quilt that makes up “Love and Theft,” Dylan had several favorite sources he drew from – Shakespeare, Mark Twain, the canon of corny jokes and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza probably produced at least three dozen lines for the album when added together. Dylan used a similar technique on Modern Times, and again had favorite sources – the works of poet laureate of the Confederacy Henry Timrod and the letters of Henry Rollins among them. The Bible was also more used on Modern Times than on “Love and Theft.” The difference mostly lies in the extent to which he uses pastiche.

The best songs on this album, which takes its name from a Charlie Chaplin film, are better than anything on “Love and Theft,” but the album as a whole isn’t. The most interesting songs are the three slower songs on the last half of the album – “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Nettie Moore” and “Ain’t Talkin’.” These songs take cultural reference points – a Merle Haggard song, an old folk tune, and a conflation of the Garden of Eden with Revelation – and do something new with them. The melodies seem to be original. Some of the other interesting songs use Biblical allusion to great effect. “Thunder On the Mountain” is named for the passage where Moses is given the law, and several allusions to Exodus appear in this song, but so does Alicia Keys, and the whole thing is plastered against a great rockabilly beat. I’m also fond of “Spirit On the Water.” The melody sounds stolen, but I can’t say from where. It opens by describing the spirit as “the darkness on the face of the deep,” which also opens Genesis. It is a love song to this spirit, but a strained love song, and the spirit is God. The speaker in the song is Cain (“I can’t go back to paradise no more; I killed a man back there.”). This opens up several possibilities.

There are a couple songs based on other songs that manage to be at least a bit original, and then there are the three irredeemable sins of the album – “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” “Someday Baby,” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break.” Dylan stole these songs from Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes and Joe McCoy & Memphis Minnie. Dylan copied these songs musically – often to the keys, the arrangements, and even the solos – and his band performs them wonderfully, but they aren’t his (even though he is listed as author). A few lyrics are changed here and there – especially in “Someday Baby” (though the lyrics in the refrain remain the same) – but they are mostly the same as well. In “Love and Theft,” Dylan was also stealing melodies and song titles, but he was mixing them in interesting ways that were surprising and that created juxtaposition. He wasn’t writing, necessarily, but he was creating something new. In these songs he isn’t, and that is where this album’s weaknesses lie. I can go back and listen to my original recordings and be just as pleased, probably more so, than by listening to these covers that are soured by being called originals.

Best song: Nettie Moore – In the fantastic Bob Dylan In America, Sean Wilentz explains how this song work: Dylan is writing in couplets, pairing a line taken from an old American folk tune, then pairing it with a line of contemporary parlance. This means we get great lines like “Lost John sitting on a railroad track…. something’s out of whack.” The song’s title, and part of the refrain, is adapted by the antewar social song “Gentle Nettie Moore.” The rest follows along in the pattern Wilentz describes, and to great effect.

Worst song: Someday Baby – I actually dislike “When the Levee’s Gonna Break” a bit more, but this song pales in comparison to what it could have been. I think Dylan realizes that, which is probably why it is the only song from Modern Times he has yet to play live. Still, the song has proven popular despite my misgivings. Based on its appearance in an iTunes commercial, the song briefly climbed to #95 on the Hot 100 Singles, Dylan’s first appearance on that chart since 1985.

Best outtake: Someday Baby – This outtake was one of the great revelations on Tell Tale Signs, the anthology of 1989-2006 odds’n’ends that Columbia put out in 2008. It is a unique melody, almost certainly Dylan’s, and has many different lyrics that are superior to what ended up on the album. If Dylan had released this and done similar things with the album’s other copied songs, it would have been a much stronger album indeed.

Live Version: Thunder On the Mountain – Dylan was right to give this song to rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson. It is a great party tune that is rollicking and unruly with a tight groove. It is an easy crowd please with the crunchy guitars, which probably explains why it has been the most performed, and best performed, song from Modern Times.

Rhymes: bitches/orphanages (“Thunder On the Mountain”); horse/forced; dime/crime; clung/tongue (2-4 from “Workingman’s Blues #2”); berserk/paperwork (“Nettie Moore”)

Images: “I’m sweating blood” (“Spirit On the Water”); “got my mind tied up in knots” (“Someday Baby”); “a greasy trail” (“Nettie Moore”); “the wounded flowers were dangling from the vine” “a toothache in my heel” (4-5 from “Ain’t Talkin’”)

Axioms: “I’m gonna raise me an army of some tough sons of bitches; I’m recruitin’ my army from the orphanages;” “I’ve sucked the milk out of a thousand cows” (“Thunder On the Mountain”); “the buying power of the proletariat’s gone down” (“Workingman’s Blues #2”); “something’s out of whack;” “they say whiskey’ll kill you, but I don’t think it will” (“Nettie Moore”); “I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned” (“Ain’t Talkin’”)

Dylan Album Project: "Love and Theft"

2011-12-21T12:49:00.001-08:00

“Love and Theft” (2001)

In one of the interviews Dylan gave around the time of this album’s release, he was asked which other album of his it most reminded him on, and he answered Greatest Hits. It is easy to see why, though “Love and Theft” is richer not only in scope and unity, as most albums are when compared to compilations, but also in variety and sound. This album moves from rockabilly to swing to country to blues to hard rock to pre-war pop. It has it all, and it pulls it from different sources.

The album’s title is a key to its creation. For the most part, the lyrics are appropriated – from knock-knock jokes, from poetry, from Japanese gangster novels – without attribution. The album’s titled is borrowed from a book by Eric Lott on blackface minstrelsy. Lott’s thesis is that white men want the black man’s mythologized penis, and so the act of blackface is a way for them to try to steal what they love about blacks, and that this underlying Freudian desire is really just a symbol for whites making white culture by stealing and then “sanitizing” black culture. I don’t think “Love and Theft” is as interested in race, but it does hinge on the idea of stealing what one loves in order to make something new out of it.

This album was released on 9/11. It was the height of the Napster/Bear Share/whatever other file sharing service was the flavor of the week movement, and I’d had the album for three or four days by the time the twin towers got hit. I think I was singing “Floater (Too Much To Ask)” to myself as I strolled into my first class of the day and saw what was happening on the TV. Immediately, once that connection is made, it is easy to read the album as prophetic – “sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down” – as well as the sadly inevitable responses of the United States – “my captain he’s decorated, he’s well schooled and he’s skilled; he’s not sentimental at all, don’t bother him how many of his pals have been killed” and, perhaps more tellingly, “I’m here to create the new imperial empire.” Maybe he was capturing the zeitgeist before it was there, but that doesn’t seem to be the point. As concepts, love and theft act as opposites. Usually, if one thieves something they covet it, because true love never takes, but what Dylan is stealing doesn’t take away from the original source, and may deepen it by associating it with other sources.

This returns me to the album’s title, and its significance. The first time I heard these songs, I heard them on different days. I heard “Po Boy” first, and it seemed (and still seems) strange. It was, I believe, an authorized posting. Then there was a promotional forty-five with “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” backed with “Bye and Bye,” so those came early too. I got two or three songs a day. When I got them all, I sequenced it and I remember being taken aback by the strong amount of juxtaposition. At first, I saw it as alphabetical. In “Lonesome Day Blues,” Dylan sings “I wish my mother was still alive.” His mother had died in 2000. Then in “Floater,” the next song, he sings “I’m in love with my second cousin,” which is among the most off-putting lines in the history of popular music, though maybe one of the truest in the sense that it represents a kind of truth; it certainly isn’t autobiographical since nothing here is. It is, though, an autobiography of American culture; a recasting of what we’ve produced and what we’ve stolen.

The more one listens to “Love and Theft,” the more one realizes how much of it is borrowed. In those first days, I listened to “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” a lot. It was featured in a television commercial starring Ricky Jay as a poker dealer. Of course the titled was a reference to Alice In Wonderland, and a few years later, on a bootleg of Elvis Presley performing on the Louisiana Hayride in 1954, I discovered it was also the title of another song. It’s a song about sibling rivalry, and about fratricide. It is no wonder they are “living in the land of Nod,” where Cain went after slaying Abel. The first time through the song, the opening of the second verse has them “taking a streetcar named Desire.” A few lines later, Tweedle Dum says “his master’s voice is calling me,” perhaps trying into the Biblical reference of Nod, but certainly coming not out of the Bible but from a record on the RCA Victor label. A small terrier obediently sits next to an old gramophone, the horn pointed in his face. Beneath the picture, the caption reads “his master’s voice.” A verse or so later, “I got love for you honey, and its all in vain” makes better use of Robert Johnson’s “Love In Vain” than Dylan’s 1978 disaster “Is Your Love In Vain?,” and surprises by using “and” where “but would seem more appropriate; this slight avoidance of cliché is what Michael Gray refers to as “minimizing the badness.” A couple months later, the music was found to be lifted from Johnnie & Jack Anglin’s “Uncle John’s Bongos.” It is my contention that every line, every song title, every melody is borrowed from somewhere. The album is then a cultural quilt. It is the work, quite literally, of everyman. Every month or so, I uncover another allusion. I don’t think there is a method to it, necessarily, or that it is fully constructed, but it doesn’t need to be. It is conceptually courageous enough that even if parts are a mismashed Frankenstein of sources, the whole transcends that as a statement of what is.

Of course, my love for this album may be dependent on it being the first Dylan album release that was in itself an event for me. It may be that I like the concept so much I’m able to forgive what is truly a crappy album. I don’t think so, though, and the amount of people who love this album, many of them loving it more than their predecessor, bear me out. My experience is also that everyone who loves this album has a different favorite song on it, which may be what makes it most like a greatest hits album.

Best song: Floater (Too Much to Ask) – A very strange song, almost Victorian, but it encapsulates so much of what makes “Love and Theft” great. It feels like a string of non sequitirs, but it creates its own world. It blends humor with sorrow, family with solitude, privilege with luck, and of course it conflates high and low culture. Shakespeare shows up all over this album with various songs containing references to at least five of his plays – Othello, Hamlet, Measure by Measure, As You Like It and, in this song, Romeo and Juliet. Instead of the tragically doomed young lovers, blind to the world beyond them, Dylan casts them as an old married couple, whom senility has allowed to be honest as Romeo tells Juliet her face has suffered with age. Not only does Dylan turn them into low culture – just the butt of a joke about aging – when Juliet tells Romeo “you can’t just shove off if it bothers you so much” it is a more American gesture than anything Maria could have hoped to pull off in West Side Story.

Worst song: Lonesome Day Blues – This probably tends to be the third most popular song on the album, after “High Water” and “Mississippi,” and though lyrically it has some nice twists, including two verses based on parts taken out of Huck Finn and another based on a combination of the Travel Channel’s Great Vacation Homes and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza.

Live version: High Water (For Charlie Patton) – On the album version, this opens with simply the most menacing banjo line ever produced. It drives hard, full of furious jabs. It is my favorite part of the album. In this rendition, it is a wholly different beast. Recorded at Bonnaroo in 2004 rocks as hard as “Honest With Me,” the toughest song on “Love and Theft.”

Rhymes: bones/grindstone (“Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum”); sublime/rhyme (“Mississippi”); happiness/repossessed (“Bye and Bye”); crimson/limbs and (“Moonlight”); blanket/drank it (“Po’ Boy”)

Images: “sky full of fire, pain pouring down” (“Mississippi”); “timber, two-foot-six across, burns with the bark still on” (“Floater (Too Much to Ask)”); “coffins droppin’ in the street like balloons made out of lead” (“High Water (For Charlie Patton)”); “the earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone;” “the trailing moss in mystic glow, the purple blossoms soft as snow” (4-5 from “Moonlight”)

Axioms: “I’m going to teach peace to the conquered; I’m going to tame the proud” (“Lonesome Day Blues”); “my grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth” (“Floater (Too Much To Ask)”); “You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice? Well, I’ll sell ‘em to you at a reduced price” (“Honest With me”); “I’ll die before I turn senile” (“Cry Awhile”); “I got my back to the Son cause the light is too intense” (“Sugar Baby”)

Dylan Album Project: Time Out of Mind

2011-12-20T10:07:00.000-08:00

Time Out of Mind (1997)

All it takes to have a best-selling album in the United States is to have a near brush with death. Shortly before the release of Time Out of Mind, Dylan suffered from pericarditis, a deadly inflammation of the sack around the heart, and, to paraphrase him, he nearly went to see Elvis. Early in his career, Dylan said one of the things he admired about folk music – real folk music – was the way that it accepted death as a natural fact. Death is all over As Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, so it is no surprise that when he got back to writing again, having undergone his plan to reconnect with his love of music by revisiting the folk songs he fell in love with when he was young, his writing dealt more frankly with death than it had in a long time. It doesn’t matter that he wrote the songs and finished recorded them well before his pericarditis started, the intersection of the illness with the album’s release caused people to see it as about Dylan’s fear of his own impending death, which is kind of counter to what the album should get across, which is that death is an inescapable fact, so there’s no use in fearing it. Just as Johnny Cash’s American Recordings series, which had been brilliant since its inception – failed to generate many sales until he was on his deathbed, the public hadn’t flocked to the last several Dylan records until they thought they might lose him. The sales and accolades poured in. The album received first critical acclaim and then popular approval. It was Dylan’s first top ten album since 1979 and signaled a major return. Many see this as his best album since the mid-70s. I disagree with that assessment, but it is still a damn good album, though it could have been better.

Where the album fails is in its pacing. Dylan likes to alternate between slow and fast tempos, rockers and ballads, even when making an acoustic album – and this was certainly not acoustic. Lanois use of layering and compression, though, gave most of the album a dull sheen. Dylan has complained extensively about this, saying the album didn’t come out the way he wanted it to. In particular, Dylan thought “Cold Irons Bound,” which won one of the album’s three Grammy awards for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (the other two were for Album of the Year and Best Contemporary Folk Album), had been ruined. Some of the best songs that Dylan wrote for the album were kept off, ostensibly because he didn’t like Lanois’ production. This was certainly the case with “Mississippi,” a song he would give to Sheryl Crow and which would also be a hit for the Dixie Chicks before he released his own version on “Love & Theft,” which Lanois wanted to make sound, according to Dylan, “sexy, sexy, and more sexy” by adding in polyrhythmic drumming. Three different versions of the song from these sessions were eventually released on Tell Tale Signs, a collection of outtakes recorded between 1989 and 2006. Other outtakes included “Marchin’ To the City,” a far superior version of what would later become “Til I Fell In Love With You.” “Dreamin’ of You” had lyrics which made it into several other songs, but had a uniquely jazzy sound to it that would have added to the album’s monotony. Finally, “Red River Shore” would have been the best song on the album had it been included. The song that gets the most attention from this album, “Not Dark Yet,” is one of the weaker tracks in my opinion, even though it is weak on what is overall a very solid album.

Best song: Standing In the Doorway – There are a lot of good songs on this album, and I almost went with “Highlands,” which was originally 35 minutes before Dylan and Lanois edited it down to the 17 minutes it takes up on the album. This song is also epic, though; a portrait of heartache that references several different old blues songs before ending with the great image of “the blues wrapped around my head.”

Worst song: Make You Feel My Love – This was a close one with “’Til I Fell In Love With You,” but “Make You Feel My Love” wins for two reasons – it is definitely the most lightweight song on Time Out of Mind (though musically more interesting than its competition), and because I have a story I want to tell about it. I think it was in an airport – I really can’t remember. Somewhere I met someone who knew Garth Brooks manager and I got this story from him. Given the nature of it, it may be apocryphal, but it has the ring of Dylan truth. Garth Brooks had been approached to record a song for the soundtrack of the Sandra Bullock/Harry Connick Jr. romance Hope Floats. He didn’t have any ideas floating around, so he asked his manager if he thought Dylan would have anything. His manager told him that Dylan hadn’t written anything in years. Garth asked if he wouldn’t just call him up and check, so the manager did. Dylan was about to head out for a tour, but said that he did have something. He was leaving I assume from his house in Malibu and was about to fly out of LAX. Dylan said that if the manager could pick Garth up and meet him at the Burger King by the airport early the next morning (around 4 am), he’d teach him the song before he left. The story ended with the guy saying “can you imagine sitting there chomping on your Whopper when you notice Bob Dylan is schooling Garth Brooks at the next table over?!?” Either way, I heard Dylan later said he regretting letting Brooks have the song. More likely, Don Was, the soundtrack’s producer, got the song based on knowing Dylan through Under the Red Sky or Sheryl Crow, who early in her career was a backup singer for Dylan and who covered the then-unreleased “Mississippi” around the same time gave Brooks the hook up, as she also appears on the Hope Floats soundtrack.

Best outtake: Red River Shore – One of the all-time great Dylan songs, and clearly his best work in the 1990s. While the old folk songs influence is stamped all over Time Out of Mind, this song could have been one of the old folk songs. A strange tale about Jesus and a ghost the boy loved, if the boy was ever alive to begin with. It seems innocuous enough as it starts out, but as the tale develops, it becomes clear one of the two principals is dead, and different parts suggest it may be both the narrator’s beloved and the narrator himself.

Notable live version: Tryin’ To Get To Heaven – On the album, this song was a clear standout. It is one of the stronger tracks, and the lyrics – which recall reconstruction, the Missiouri Compromise, and the sweep of American experience, all in the face of dealing with the stringency of one’s own more turptitude – pop more on the album version than they do here. The album is mostly easy, open chords with a few tricks and licks. In 2000, Dylan completely rewrote it using a bunch of jazz chords and a completely different melody. The result is utterly gorgeous.

Rhymes: thunder/plunder (“Love Sick”); guitar/cigar (“Standing In the Doorway”); disintegrate/wait (“Can’t Wait”); wrong/Erica Jong; dog monologue (4-5 from “Highlands”)

Images: “my brain is so wired and the clouds are weeping” (“Love Sick”); “ice water in my veins” (“Standing In the Doorway”); “every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb” (“Not Dark Yet”); “clouds of blood” (“Cold Irons Bound”); “honeysuckle bloomin’ in the wildwood air, bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow” (“Highlands”)

Axioms: “Gonna find me a janitor to sweep me off my feet” (“Million Miles”); “I don’t know what alright even means;” “I’ve been to Sugartown and I shook the sugar down” (2-3 from “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”); “reality has always had too many heads” (“Cold Irons Bound”); “I got new eyes; everything looks far away” (“Highlands”)

Dylan Album Project: World Gone Wrong

2011-12-19T12:27:00.001-08:00

World Gone Wrong (1993)

When As Good As I Been To You came out, Columbia not only gave Dylan credit for all of the arrangements, they even gave him credit for writing many of the songs. Leave it to a bunch of label hacks to screw that up. There was a bit of an outcry among folk scholars that Dylan was attempting to make money off arrangements he’d stolen from artists who had been recording in the 20s and 30s. When he put out this sequel of sorts, which I feel features inferior guitar playing to the preceding album and some songs that are better and some that are worse, he decided to cover his tracks by writing his own liner notes. These are what truly give this album the edge. They are inscrutable and entertaining, all at the same time.

As for the songs, there are many stron ones here. Standouts for me include “Jackaroe,” a more feminist version of the themes on “Canadee-I-O” (but not a retelling). In this song, the woman has more agency. In “Canadee-I-O” she wants to go to sea with her man – a military operation but not necessarily a battle. She pays her man to help her sneak into the hold and dress as a sailor. In “Jackaroe,” the man is far away and the woman dresses as a man and successfully enlists. At the end, the protagonist of “Canadee-I-O” is betrayed by her lover, but takes up with the ship’s captain, who stands up for her. After taking up with him, she sublimates her personality and becomes a trophy wife; in “Jackaroe,” the protagonist finds her disenfranchised soldier dying on the battlefield and nurses him back to health, and he loves her because of her courageousness, not in spite of it. “Stackalee” is flooring in its power, and “Delia” is flooring in its quietude – very different than say Cash’s “Delia’s Gone,” Dylan’s “Delia” nonetheless has more pathos than any other take on “Delia” I know. He says it is “two or more versions mixed into one,” but what makes it so unique is the point of view. The story is about a 14-year old girl who gets shot down by her gangster boyfriend. Dylan sings it from the point of view of the quiet boy who had a crush on her – “she loved all them rounders, but never had time for me.” “Two Soldiers,” recounting promises that can’t be kept, is a little-known tragic gem.

Best song: Stack-A-Lee – Great rendition of the murder ballad with the double moral of don’t mess with another man’s hat, and if someone does mess with your hat, don’t be a jerk wad about it.

Worst song: Ragged and Dirty – Good performance of a great song, which shows that the album is probably pretty good overall.

Outtake: Mary and the Soldier – This is a piece with “Jack-A-Roe” and “Canadee-I-O.” The daughter of a rich military commander, Mary falls in love with a soldier her father trains and plans to follow him into battle. Her father, knowing where he will send the soldier, forbids it, and so does the soldier until he is enamored by her determination.

Live rendition: Delia – Dylan has always had periods where he’ll include several old folk songs in his set, and he did a beautiful version of this song in England in 2000.

Five best quotes from the liner notes: “an infantile sensualist – white teeth, wide smile, lotza money, kowtows to fairy queen exploiters & corrupt religious establishments, career minded, limousine double parked, imposing his will & dishonest garbage in popular magazines” (on “Love Henry”); “futurologists would insist it’s a matter of taste. They say ‘let’s sleep on it’ but they’re already living in the sanitarium;” “give me a thousand acres of tractable land & all the gang members that exist & you’ll see the Authentic alternative lifestyle, the Agrarian one” (on “Stack-A-Lee”); “evil charlatans masquerading in pullover vests & tuxedos talking gobbledygook, monstrous pompous superficial pageantry parading down lonely streets on limited access highways;” (on “World Gone Wrong”); “America when Mother was the queen of Her heart, before Charlie Chaplin, before the Wild One, before the Children of the Sun – before the celestial grunge, before the insane world of entertainment exploded in our faces – before all the ancient & honorable artillery had been taken out of the city, learning to go forward by turning back the clock” (on “Two Soldiers”)

Dylan Album Project: As Good As I Been To You

2011-12-18T10:06:00.001-08:00

Good As I Been To You (1992)

Finally having given up on trying to be hip, Dylan decided to return to his roots. He recorded an album of covers, mostly of old folk songs, with David Bromberg in early ’92. Unhappy with the results (although what has been released is really good), he decided to record a whole different set of songs in his garage with just him and his guitar. Old murder ballads, songs by Stephen Foster, sea shanties, etc. Dylan would repeat this strategy the next year with World Gone Wrong, though this is known as being the album with more well-known songs. A few – “Frankie and Albert,” “Froggie Went A-Courtin’” – I can see that about, but I certainly didn’t know “Canadee-I-O” or “Diamond Joe” before I picked this up, and I only knew the songs I did know from having studied my folk music. Trying to pick favorites from this is a really tough call. Everything on it is so strong.

While most critics consider this the weaker of Dylan’s two early nineties acoustic folk albums, it has the better guitar work. “Frankie and Albert” and “Step It Up and Go” in particular show off the nimbleness of Dylan’s fingers. The album puts to rest any questions over Dylan’s guitar-playing ability. Usually his guitar sound is hidden behind a sea of more famous guitarists, but here his guitar is naked and on par with his voice, and it turns out to be a thing of beauty.

While the songs here may not be considered quite as unique, there is some really interesting material. The frog-mouse nuptials of “Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” the cross-dressing female naval officer of “Canadee-I-O,” a song about having a crush on a woman simply because she’s liable to drink you under the table then crush your nuts in a vice (that would be “Little Maggie” for those keeping score at home), as well as stuff like the anti-military ballad “Arthur McBride.” A more diverse set would be hard to find, especially on an album of acoustic covers.

Best song: Step It Up and Go – I rarely go back to the album to hear this song – I rarely think about it – but that guitar playing is just amazing. He’s pulling a Leadbelly on this song, playing lead over his own rhythm.

Worst song: You’re Gonna Quit Me, Baby – Good song, but not good enough to name the album after it.

Outtake: You Belong To Me – This song was a hit for Jo Stafford in the mid-50s. Dylan recorded it for this album, then gave it to Oliver Stone for inclusion on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack, where Dylan sat alongside Dr. Dre for probably the first time in his career.

Live rendition: Hard Times – A year after this album was released, Dylan performed two songs at Willie Nelson’s 60^th birthday. He opened with this and then dueted with Willie on “Pancho & Lefty,” which Dylan rewrote the lyrics too. He nailed them both.

Dylan Album Project: Under the Red Sky

2011-12-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

Under the Red Sky (1990)

Although Dylan was garnished with critical acclaim for Oh Mercy, he didn’t have the catapult back into the popular spotlight he’d hoped Lanois would be able to give him. So he went to another superstar producer, Don Was of Was (Not Was), who had recently had a huge hit with the B-52s’ Cosmic Thing. It was Was’s job to make the album a hit, which he attempted to do by bringing in a slew of guests stars to record with Dylan, including Slash, Elton John, George Harrison and Stevie Ray Vaughn, among others. Dylan, for his part, brought a group of songs unified around a theme: nursery rhymes. Dylan dedicated the album to Gabby Goo, a nickname for his daughter Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan, born out of Dylan’s second secret marriage that was not to become public knowledge for another decade after the album came out. One view is that the songs were written for her enjoyment, but many of them are dark-edged, just as many nursery rhymes also are. Certainly some of them are based on nursery rhymes. The title track conflates “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” and “The Man In the Moon.” “Handy Dandy” (which not only sounds a lot like “Like A Rolling Stone” but features the same organ player) originated out of Jacky Dandy, which opens “Handy spandy / Jacky Dandy,” but the fortress imagery is also suggestive of the rhyme “King Pippin.” “10,000 Men” alludes to “10,000 Men of Bedfordshire” in both text and theme. This is only a brief skimming, and certainly there is much more worthy of analysis. Some of the songs work and others it is hard to tell.

What is certain about this album is that the production didn’t work. Whether Dylan or Was is to blame is another story. Slash says that he recorded a fantastic solo for “Wiggle Wiggle” that Was enthused over but Dylan wanted left on the cutting room floor. I can’t imagine much making that song good, but more Slash couldn’t have made it much worse. The sound is both thin and cramped, and the whole thing seems canned and inorganic. Even though I realize it is a better album from an objective standpoint than the albums between Infidels and Oh Mercy, I find it less listenable than them nearly all of the time. I find that sad, because I suspect there are some songs I would really like on it.

Despite a truly bizarre music video made for ‘Unbelievable,” which features a pig with piercing hanging out with Bob Dylan and Molly Ringwald, the album was a major flop. Luckily, Dylan finally gave up trying to be popular, which is what allowed him to again become popular.

Best song: Under the Red Sky – George Harrison plays on this, and for that reason it sounds almost like a Traveling Wilbury’s outtake rather than a Dylan song.

Worst song: Wiggle, Wiggle – Basically, its about a penis. “Wiggle till it whispers, wiggle till it hums, wiggle till it answers, wiggle till it comes,” Eek! Well, at least it falls in a tradition I guess, even though dirty blues is a tradition Dylan usually does best to stay out of.

Notable live version: Cat’s In the Well – this has long been a concert favorite. Once a rarity, the last few years have found it being a semi-regular opener. I saw it in 2007 in Kansas City.

Rhymes: soup/hoop (“Wiggle, Wiggle”); stick/quick; dignified/sanctified/satisfied; civilized/analyzed/criticized (“Unbelievable”); pursuits/fruits (“TV Talkin’ Song”)

Images: “the blind horse that leads you around” (“Under the Red Sky”); “smoke that vine, beat that horse, and saddle up the drum” (“Unbelievable”); “the blinking stardust of a pale blue light” (“Born In Time”); “spilling my buttermilk, sweeping it up with a broom” (“10,000 Men”); “a bag full of sorrow” (“Handy Dandy”)

Axioms: “they used to say it was the land of milk and honey; now they say it’s the land of money;” “all the sweethearts you can hold are hanging on a tree” (“Unbelievable”); “who could your lover be? Let me eat off his head so you can really see!” (“10,000 Men”); “grief is showing its face; the world is being slaughtered and its such a bloody disgrace”; “back alley Sally is doing the American Jump” (“Cat’s In the Well”)

Dylan Album Project: Oh Mercy

2011-12-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

Oh Mercy (1989)

What an album. After years of slogging through crap, Oh Mercy didn’t even make a blip on the radar of many Dylan fans when it was released, which is a shame because it is his finest album of the 80s. Now the album is usually placed among the best second-tier Dylan albums, even though it probably belongs in the top tier. To make a great album, Dylan took Bono’s advice and hired Daniel Lanois as producer, then opted to record the album in New Orleans backed by many of that city’s musicians, such as Rockin’ Dopsie, Cyril Neville and Willie Green. The result was ethereal, smoky and mesmerizing, and there were enough great leftovers to provide numerous outtakes over the years. This was the first album where it was clear Dylan’s voice had changed, but the music changed to fit it. This music was crafted around Dylan’s older croak, and turns it once again into an instrument.

Part of what allows this album to be so successful is not only the crafting of the sound, but also the thematics. While all of Dylan’s 80s albums have songs that deal with his greatest theme – America – and also with God, greed, etc., they also had songs that didn’t really have any sort of meaning to them. On Oh Mercy, Dylan had songs hearkening back to the best work from all his great periods. “Political World” has all the righteous fury of the songs on The Times They Are A-Changin’. “Most of the Time” would not be thematically out of place on Blood On the Tracks, and an early version was recorded with an arrangement that sounded like it could have come from the New York Sessions recorded for that album. “Ring Them Bells” is one of Dylan’s strongest religious tracks; it is almost a hymn. And even the album’s weakest song – “Disease of Conceit” – manages to tackle issues way beyond the scope of three quarters of what is on the three albums before it.

Best song: Most of the Time – Just heartbreaking. The bass line makes this the best version of this song, which Dylan continued to tinker with. In 1990 it came out as a European single in an almost grunge-rock version that was really hard. It sounded more like Neil Young than Bob Dylan. This version is soft, a whisper, but a powerful whisper. The bass is like a broken heartbeat that will never quite be able to heal itself.

Worst song: Disease of Conceit – The lyrics to this are just cliché, at times bordering on silly. In Chronicles, Dylan’s memoirs, the best part of the book is about the recording of this album and a strange man he meets in the bayou named Sun Pie. In there, though, he talks extensively about writing the lyrics to this song and offers up many verses he wrote but later rejected. They are not only sillier, but they are high school poetry – oh noetry!

Best outtake: Born In Time – This was a close battle with “Dignity,” a film noir detective story set to music where the detective, a Dylan personae, is searching for dignity, which is suspected of murder. It has many great lines, like “someone showed me a picture and I just laughed; Dignity’s never been photographed,” but it doesn’t have the elegance of “Born In Time.” This song was rerecorded for inclusion on Under the Red Sky, but the original is better. Two versions from these sessions have been released, each with a different set of lyrics than the version on Under the Red Sky. The version I prefer, which appeared on the bootleg Deeds of Mercy, has the best set of lyrics of them all.

Notable live version: Ring Them Bells – In 1993, Dylan did a series of concerts at the Supper Club in New York for a live album and concert video that never materialized. I assume he figured he could get more publicity from MTV’s Unplugged series, so when they offered to do an episode on him he dropped this project. That’s a shame because the concerts, as far as I can tell, were rather splendid affairs. This song is hopeful, beautiful and sad. I see ringing them bells as a way of empathizing with pain, and perhaps the most powerful empathy is with those “chosen few who will judge the many when the game is through,” suggesting that those chosen few won’t be the ones who necessarily want to judge, which is a sobering thought I can find a lot of solace in.

Rhymes: plank/bank; microscope/rope (“Political World”); ploughs/vows (“Everything is Broken”); gave/depraved (“Man In the Long Black Coat”); skip/lip (“What Was It You Wanted?”)

Images: “cities of lonesome fear” (“Political World”); “rivers of blindness” (“Where Teardrops Fall”); “broken treaties, broken vows, broken pipes” (“Everything is Broken”); “African trees bent over backward from a hurricane breeze;” “tree trunks uprooted ’neath the high crescent moon” (“Man In the Long Black Coat”)

Axioms: “mercy walks the plank,” “shout God’s name, but you’re never quite sure what it is” (“Political World”); “they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong” (“Ring Them Bells”); “people don’t live or die; people just float” (“Man In the Long Black Coat”); “If I turn myself off so I can’t hear you cry, what good am I?” (“What Good Am I?”)

Dylan Album Project: Down In the Groove

2011-12-14T16:51:00.000-08:00

Down in the Groove (1988)

Another unproduced album on par with Knocked Out Loaded. I give this the slight edge only because it is more listenable on average, even though they are both pretty bad. On Knocked Out Loaded there is only the one real highlight, while here both folk covers, “Shenandoah” and “Rank Strangers To Me,” are pretty good, while “Silvio” is kind of charming. This is perhaps Dylan’s most hodge-podged effort. There are a couple of originals, though mostly from other products – “Death Is Not the End” was recorded for Infidels (and wisely left off) and “Had A Dream About You, Baby” is an alternate take of the song which was recorded for Hearts of Fire, a 1987 feature film starring Dylan, Rupert Everett and Fiona. Other songs were a result of Dylan touring with the Grateful Dead in ’87, a tour which produced what many feel to be Dylan’s worst live album, Dylan and the Dead. During the tour, Robert Hunter managed to convince Dylan to write music to accompany two sets of lyrics that the Dead had rejected as not good enough, “Ugliest Girl in the World” and “Silvio.” Despite these misgivings, it manages to be a little more focused than Knocked Out Loaded and is less produced than anything since Shot of Love, which is nice for a change. Some songs were recorded with Down In the Groove in mind, though, and two of those, covers of Slim Harpo’s “Got Love If You Want It” and Gene Vincent’s “Important Words,” were only included on South American pressings.

Best song: Shenandoah – Just a simple, rather pretty version of this classic ballad about a forbidden affair between a white man and an Indian maiden whose tribe disapproves.

Worst song: Death Is Not the End – Mostly, it is the horrific background vocals, provided by R&B legends Full Force (who started with hip-hop pioneers like UTFO and have had continued success working with Britney Spears, Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas, among others), that make this otherwise lifeless ballad groan interminably.

Best outtake: Got Love If You Want It – Best is a relative term, as this song still pretty much sucks. The song is about as basic as you can get, and so is this cover, but at least it’s kind of catchy.

Notable live version: Silvio – “Silvio,” the song which always gets picked to represent this wreck of an album on greatest hits compilations, spent many years as a live staple that allowed Dylan’s guitarists to warm up and stretch out.

Dylan Album Project: Knocked Out Loaded

2011-12-12T17:02:00.000-08:00

Knocked Out Loaded (1986)

Empire Burlesque was certainly no winner, but it had its moments; Knocked Out Loaded is Dylan at his absolute worst. Several of the originals are co-written, which isn’t necessarily bad, but two of the three aren’t winners. Dylan doesn’t do much better writing for himself, but it is telling when the second best song on this album is a Kristofferson cover recorded with a children’s choir. Kristofferson is great, but the children’s choir on “They Killed Him,” a song about Ghandi, MLK and Christ, is a bit much. Luckily, it is a short album. It is a mangled affair, pieced together from a variety of sessions with no coherence in who plays on what. It isn’t really produced at all, just cobbled.

Best song: Brownsville Girl – Dylan wrote this with playwright Sam Shepard. It is really a rewrite of “New Danville Girl,” an outtake from Empire Burlesque, and although everything else on Knocked Out Loaded is an utter waste, this song is brilliant. It is definitely among Dylan’s best songs of the 80s, and probably among the best of his whole career. Being a nearly 12-minute song, it has a lot of lines in it, and it probably has as high of a great line to crappy line ratio as anything in the Dylan catalog, including “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).”

Worst song: Driftin’ Too Far from Shore – The background singers can’t even syncopate to be on the same beat as Dylan. He may have been messing them up intentionally because he knew this song was a lost cause. One of many songs recorded for but left off Empire Burlesque, several overdubs were added to this and none of them helped it.

Dylan Album Project: Empire Burlesque

2011-12-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Empire Burlesque (1985)

The mid-80s are undoubtedly the nadir of Dylan’s career, and that nadir starts with this album. Some of the songs here are actually stronger than they are given credit for. “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” isn’t that bad, and “Something’s Burning, Baby” and “Never Gonna Be the Same Again” are alright. “I’ll Remember You” is pleasant enough. “Tight Connection To My Heart” could have been good had it not been butchered in the revisions between it and “Someone’s Got Ahold of My Heart,” the original, superior version recorded for Infidels. The album was recorded with several different bands, but mostly included members of the Heartbreakers, Tom Petty’s backup band who would back Dylan on tour for much of the next two years, and the musicians from Infidels. Dylan produced basic tracks that worked pretty well, but he wanted a bit hit. He wasn’t satisfied with Infidels sales and wanted a full return to the spotlight. To achieve this he hired New Order’s producer Arthur Baker to give him an MTV-ready sound and even recorded three music videos; the one for “Tight Connection To My Heart” is hilariously bad. The mid-80s poppiness dated the music horribly, though, overlaying the basic tracks with synthesized horns, preprogrammed drum beats and unnecessary whoops from the background singers. This album also began to show something of a bout of writer’s block – even though Dylan wrote all of the songs, dozens of lines from classic movies from the 40s and 50s showed up in them.

Best song: Clean Cut Kid – Robert Christgau loved this song, and until recently I never could see why. Lyrically, it’s in the top two songs on the album, and it drives pretty hard too. This is Dylan’s only song to directly address Vietnam. Typically, Dylan chose to stay out of temporal issues, knowing that once you wrote a song tied to a specific moment, its themes would die with that moment. There are so many specifics in here, though, that it seems as though the “Clean Cut Kid” has to be some kind of real person.

Worst song: Emotionally Yours – There was a video for this and it later became something of a hit single for 70s funk band the O’Jays. It is just kind of flat in the emotional register when it wants so badly to be deep and affecting.

Best outtake: When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky – Dylan recorded a take of this song with the E-Street Band which would eventually show up on Bootleg Series 1-3, but went with an inferior take instead.

Notable live version: In the late 90s, Patti Smith joined Dylan onstage and suggest a duet on “Dark Eyes,” the haunting acoustic closer which is quite arguably the best thing on this album.

Rhymes: wood/understood (“I’ll Remember You”); pills/spill; O’Toole/pool; choir/wire (2-4 from “Clean Cut Kid”); river/deliver (“When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky”)

Images: “a guy who’s wearin’ a powder blue wig” (“Tight Connection To My Heart”); “you could ride like Annie Oakley, you could shoot like Belle Starr” (“Seeing the Real You At Last”); “a napalm help spa” (“Clean Cut Kid”); “the fireplace where my letters are burning;” that icy wind that’s howling in your eye” (“When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky”); “the earth is strung with lover’s pearls;” “the falling gods of speed and steal”

Axioms: “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble” (“Seeing the Real You At Last”); “He bought the American Dream, but it put him in debt” (“Clean Cut Kid”); “beauty may only turn to rust” (“Trust Yourself”); “I’ll know you better when my memory is not so short” (“When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky”); “I live in another world where life and death are memorized” (“Dark Eyes”)

Dylan Album Project: Infidels

2011-12-07T18:14:00.000-08:00

Infidels (1983)

Dylan is often described as chameleonic. He is known for going through changes. He’d started out a folkie, gone elecrtric, then gone country, gone gypsy, etc. Every time Dylan changed, the exodus of fans who didn’t like his new style was dwarfed by the amount of new fans he won over. That didn’t happen when Dylan went to Christianity and embraced the budding Christian Contemporary movement. More of Dylan’s fans were turned off by what they perceived as preachiness (and in concert Dylan often would preach). In addition to losing more fans than normal, you can’t really say that Christians welcomed him into the fold. Certainly some did, and initially a lot did, but there were some who remained unsure of how to take Dylan. Dylan was a bit old to appeal to the same demographic that groups like Jars of Clay would later appeal to, and so his popularity in Christian rock was limited. He decided to make an album that would return him to favor with both critics and his core audience. To do this he recorded some protest songs (“Union Sundown” covers outsourcing, “License to Kill” appeases the environmentalists, and then there’s “Neighborhood Bully”) and went for a modern sound by having the record produced by Dire Straits axeman Mark Knopfler, who played on it alongside ex-Stones’ guitarist Mick Taylor and reggae rhythm stars Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare.

When Infidels came out, it was lauded by critics and, although not a huge hit, it was his most popular album since Slow Train Coming, and probably his most successful with critics since Desire. Many (arguably correctly) saw it as a return to Judaism, and (incorrectly) as a turning away from Christianity. There are two reasons to see the album as a return to Judaism. One is the song “Neighborhood Bully,” a satire in which the titular bully, a metaphor for Israel, is made out to be a victim of slander. The other reason is a line in “Jokerman” the claims “the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers.” The Jokerman doubles occasionally as Dylan, but is mostly Jesus; both of them are Jews and it is natural they would learn first from the Torah. More on this song below.

Christ is present throughout the album, though, as is Satan (who is perhaps even more present), and it is hard to imagine the albums turns away from Christianity at all. “I and I,” a song about a one-night stand, is rooted in Rastafarian concepts of Christ. “Man of Peace” imagines the coming of the anti-Christ. “Sweetheart Like You” starts off like a lewd come-on, but then tries to convert the woman, telling her “in my father’s house there are many mansions; each one’s got a fireproof floor.” While the album is more secular than the previous three, it can hardly be said to be a non-Christian album.

The years haven’t been kind to Infidels. Hailed as a return to form at the time, the production has become a bit dated (though not nearly as much as the production on his next album), and, as bootlegs of albums sessions have been released, critics have lambasted Dylan’s decision not to include many of the best songs recorded for the albums, including the elegiac “Blind Willie McTell,” the Christianity-meets-finger-pointing song “Foot of Pride,” which describes the earth opening and swallowing up a preacher who talks about the sin of homosexuality at a cross-dresser’s funeral, and even tracks like the heartfelt but maudlin “Lord Protect My Child” and the strange “Julius and Ethel,” a song eulogizing Russian spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Still, it is commonly held to be Dylan’s second-best album of the 80s, though they are commonly held to be his worst decade.

Best song: Man of Peace – Musically, it’s basically bar rock, but at least it isn’t too overproduced. Lyrically, it has some damn interesting passages.

Worst song: Neighborhood Bully – I support Israeli freedom, and I understand why the Jews want their land and all that, but this song just sucks. Politically, the rhetoric is just dumb, and politics aside, it isn’t much of a listen.

Best outtake: Blind Willie McTell – Blind Willie McTell was a great blues singer, but that’s not what really matters in this song. Dylan had been drawing comparisons between slavery in the U.S. and the slavery of the Jews in Egypt for several years when he penned this song, which beautifully describes both simultaneously, while lamenting the fall of man that spread from “New Orleans down to Jerusalem.” Images of false vanity abound in the song’s later stages before Dylan caps it off by noting that “God is in his heaven and we all want what’s his, but power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.”

Notable live version: Jokerman – The music video for “Jokerman” is suggestive of numerous possibilities as to the Jokerman’s true identity, but in a song that opens “standing on the water, casting your bread” it is hard to deny the Christ imagery. What is also apparent is that the Jokerman is a trickster figure, a “dream twister.” The studio version is slow, drawn out, and dreamy, and also a bit overproduced. In 1984, Dylan went on Letterman to promote Infidels. He took an East LA punk band with him called The Plugz. They were working on songs for the soundtrack for the film Repo Man when Dylan heard them playing in somebody’s garage. He assumed they were neighborhood kids and offered to have them back him. “Jokerman” suddenly became rough and chaotic.

Rhymes: teachers/features(“Jokerman”); back/maniac (“Neighborhood Bully”); El Salvador/dinosaur (“Union Sundown”); put/barefoot (“I And I”); Louvre/move; waste/displaced (“Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”)

Images: “the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing;” “dream twister;” “false-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin” (1-3 from “Jokerman”); “he can ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull” (“Man of Peace”); “two men are on a train platform … waiting for spring to come smoking down the track” (“I And I”)

Axioms: “they say that vanity got the best of him, but he sure did leave here in style” “patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings; steal a little and they’ll throw you in jail, steal a lot and they’ll make you king” (1-2 from “Sweetheart Like You”) “man is opposed to fair play” (“License to Kill”) “capitalism is above the law;” “they want to grow food on the moon and eat it raw” (4-5 from “Union Sundown”)

Dylan Album Project: Shot of Love

2011-12-05T10:19:00.000-08:00

Shot of Love (1981)

While I feel that Shot of Love is underrated, it is hard not to be frustrated with it as a final project. Dylan was writing enough material at this time he could have easily released a double album or triple album that was better than this, or he could have just released one really killer single album. At the time, Dylan was working on several epics, only one of which made it onto the album initially – “Every Grain of Sand.” Later pressings also included “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” the first song to signal a growing sense of Dylan’s dissatisfaction with Christianity. “Carribean Wind” is a song Dylan has sung four times – combining performances live and in the studio – and each time it had a significantly different set of lyrics than the time before. “Angelina” is a mystical journey through a relationship, a song about a Christian who is in love with a South American woman who is decidedly not Christian, and who may be dating the anti-Christ. Instead of including it, a song which exposed Dylan as a man vulnerable to secular temptation even though he was nobly trying not to succumb, Dylan chose to include such brain-dead drivel as “Property of Jesus” and “Watered Down Love,” which are musically ok, but lyrical train wrecks. Others songs, like “In the Summertime” and “Dead Man, Dead Man” were among his most interesting Christian songs to date, and then the album was rounded out with a few songs that returned to secular themes – “Heart of Mine,” which features a cameo by Ringo Starr, and “Lenny Bruce,” a tribute to the late comedian. The secular songs, interestingly enough, are musically the most lifeless tunes on the album.

Best song: Every Grain of Sand – Inspired by William Blake and Ecclesiastes, Dylan crafted this lyric assertion of self-doubt and belief in his own damnation. Dylan has ended this song two ways – in this version it ends “I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man,” while in the demo it ends “I am hanging I the balance of God’s perfect finished plan.” One supposes pre-destination while the other supposes free will. Between the two, the demo, released on Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, is the more beautiful – less over-produced and featuring a guest vocal from Dylan’s dog who barks along in the background.

Worst song: Heart of Mine – This track featured Ringo Starr on drums and was released as the album’s first single. It isn’t horrible, just insubstantial. One of two secular songs on the album (the other being “Lenny Bruce”), “Heart of Mine” is probably the better of those songs musically, but not in terms of pathos. It is better in terms of pathos than some songs like “Property of Jesus,” but they have great hooks – in particular “Property of Jesus,” which sounds like it could have been a 1984-era hit for the E-Street Band.

Best outtake: Angelina – Most days, this is my favorite Dylan song, probably because it is so inscrutable and enigmatic. It also contains several of his best lines, i.e., “in the valley of the giants where the stars and stripes explode,” “a god with the body of a woman well-endowed and the head of a hyena,” and “I see pieces of men marching” as he walks past “the tree of smoke and the angel with four faces.” It also features caustic questions that are so characteristic of Dylan, such as “when you cease to exist, then who will you blame?” and “do I need your permission to turn the other cheek?” My semi-vague interpretation of the song appears above, based on the sense of intimacy between the speaker and Angelina, and a distrust of the tall man who must be “overthrown in Jerusalem or Argentina.”

Notable live version: Dead Man, Dead Man – Dylan released a version of this recorded in 1981 in New Orleans as the b-side to a 1989 cassette single. He sounds possessed, wild-eyed with both music and message. The song begs the question as to just who is the Dead Man, Jesus or an unrepentant sinner?

Rhymes: Medicaid/afraid (“Shot of Love”); on and on/synanon (“Lenny Bruce”); transgression/confession (“Watered Down Love”); January/married/Buenos Aires (“Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar”); legislature/perverted nature (“Trouble”)

Images: “tattooed my babies with a poison pen” (“Shot of Love”); “packaging of the soul;” “stadiums of the damned” (2-3 from “Trouble”) “the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed;” “flowers of indulgence” (4-5 from “Every Grain of Sand”)

Axioms: “he fought a war on a battlefield where every victory hurts” (“Lenny Bruce”); “God has mercy on them who are slandered and humiliated” (Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”) “the ghetto that you built for me is the one you’ll end up in” “what are you trying to overpower me with – the doctrine or the gun?” (“Dead Man, Dead Man”) “I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame, and every time I pass that way I always hear my name” (“Every Grain of Sand”)

Dylan Album Project: Saved

2011-12-03T05:48:00.000-08:00

Saved (1980)

Musically, Slow Train Coming toys with gospel, but leans toward r&b and even a little reggae in an attempt to remain commercial; Saved is full-fledged, tent-revival gospel. Like most tent-revivals, in order to become enraptured, it is best to experience the music live. Dylan recorded Saved with his road band, which meant that he lacked the superstars of Slow Train and also that the musicians were already somewhat bored of the songs, having played them night after night. The whole thing was a rushed, cheap production, and that shows in the lack of polish. That said, the album still has its own charms if you look for them. Ultimately, though, the best versions of many of these songs are the live versions which come across with more fiery passion. Dylan himself recognized this, which is why shortly after the album’s release he pleased with Columbia to release a live album from the gospel shows. The gospel albums weren’t really selling though, and after live albums in ’74, ’76 and ’78, they felt as though they had already flooded the live album market. Rumors abound that it will be released in the eventual future as part of the official Bootleg Series. Also, awful album cover.

Best song: Covenant Woman – A rewrite of “Prescious Angel” that, if not as melodic is more harmonically interesting and just as lyrically alert. In that songs, he noted that “both our forefathers were slaves,” and here he notes “I’ve got a covenant too.

Worst song: Pressing On – In some ways, this is the best song on the album, but it is apparent that Dylan didn’t really harness its power. It isn’t the worst technically, but the most disappointing. In I’m Not There, John Doe, an atheist, performs this with such conviction and such power that it floors you. Dylan, who still refers to himself as a true believer and certainly was at the time, should have found a way to tap into the song’s gorgeous power.

Best outtake: N/A – Lots of other great songs were performed on the gospel tour that never appeared on album – “Cover Down, Break Through,” “City of Gold,” “He Will Arise,” and “Ain’t Going To Go To Hell (For Anybody)” – and many of them were better than what was released, but they aren’t available in studio form. Maybe one day Columbia will release the completed but never released album of duets Bob Dylan and gospel legend Clydie King made together and they will show up on that.

Notable live version: Saved – The sound of the revival tent.

Rhymes: inside/denied/wide; life for me/mystery (1-2 from “What Can I Do For You?”); hated/created (“Solid Rock”); reign/vein (“Pressing On”); sword/Lord (“Are You Ready?”)

Images: “emptiness and wrath, and the fire that burns in it;” “I’ve been broken, shattered like an empty cup” (1-2 from“Saved”); “fiery darts” (“Covenant Woman”); “shake me up in my mind;” “shake the dust off of your feet” (4-5 from “Pressing On”)

Axioms: “I stepped out of the womb” (“Saved”); “He gets wise in his own eyes and he’s made to believe a lie” (“What Can I Do For You?”); “what’s to come has already been;” “Don’t look back” (3-4 from “Pressing On”); “wherever I’m welcome is where I’ll be” (“Saving Grace”)

Dylan Album Project: Slow Train Coming

2011-12-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

Slow Train Coming (1979)

Near the end of the 1978 world tour, at a concert in Miami, Dylan has recalled an event where a fan threw a cross on the stage. For some reason Dylan picked it up. On the tour’s last show, he debuted a new song – “Do Right To Me, Baby (Do Unto Others).” When Slow Train Coming came out in September of 1979, he was telling reporters that sometime between the end of the ’78 tour and the release of the album, he had literally felt Jesus’ hand on him. He described a religious experience where his whole hotel room was shaking and then he felt someone touching his shoulder, even though no one else was in the room. It is a powerful story. Dylan wanted to get his message to as wide an audience as possible, so to give his new music enough polish that it might actually make it onto radio, he hired seasoned producer Jerry Wexler, who had helmed all of the great soul to come out of Atlantic records, such as Ray Charles catalog, and hired the Muscle Shoals studio band and Dire Straits’ guitarist Mark Knopfler. It worked. Despite backlash from less spiritual fans, Dylan has a #3 album, and the single “Gotta Serve Somebody” was the biggest hit he’d had since “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” and remains the last top forty single he has had. What people didn’t expect is that when Dylan resumed touring he would be performing only religious material; nor did they expect Dylan to proselytize from the stage and berate the crowd for requesting the songs he know considered to be Satan’s songs. That said, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of Dylan’s conversion to Christianity. He has been tied to the conservative evangelical Vineyard Fellowship. I don’t know enough about the Vineyard Fellowship to confirm the conservative, but it certainly is evangelical. While Dylan was a member of this church, he was brought to the fold by the gospel singers he had hired for the ’78 world tour. Black gospel, his own study of the Hebrew Bible, as well as Biblical allusions by his favorite song writers like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, all helped to shape his understanding of Christianity at least as much as the Vineyard Fellowship. While Dylan is often judgmental, he had always been judgmental. What makes his judgment different is that, more than any other time in his career, the judgment is turned back on himself. He does this briefly in “Idiot Wind” and in “Isis” leading up to the conversion, and perhaps in “New Pony” as well. In “Gotta Serve Somebody,” he turned back on himself, decrying those who live in domes; Dylan was famous for constructing what many considered a horrifically ugly “onion dome” made of copper, which still serves as his primary residence. In “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking” he suggests he has been “influenced by fools.” “Precious Angel,” a love song about salvation, thanks his woman for showing him that he “was blinded.”

One of the most underrated songs, lyrically, is “Man Gave Names To All the Animals.” This song has been made into a children’s book twice, but is mostly seen as having no appeal beyond the kindergarten crowd. The interesting part is the end. Many rhetoricians tell us that language is power, and those who control how language is disseminated control power. This is why the media is so influential. By limiting dialogue, they can control who has power and who doesn’t. In the Bible, God starts off very proud of man and hopeful that man will continue in God’s perfect image, but as Cain kills Abel, Ham sees Noah naked, and then the people on the Earth start building the tower of Babel. The popular understanding is that at the tower of Babel, God creates many languages to spite the people of Earth for their pride. A more nuanced reading, though, suggests that the people speak the same language, but begin to disagree on what it means. Before, the language was pure, but now it has to be encoded and decoded, and interpretation isn’t always simple. Language is a funny thing like that and people often take very different impressions from what they read. If we accept this premise as true, than when man has power over the meaning of language, he has total control over his environment. The one man to have that would have been Adam, and, in Genesis, God gave Adam the power to create words for each different animal. Adam’s fall, though, was committing sin, and that is why once it comes time to name the snake, Adam falters, because the song is not just a cutesy nursery rhyme, but an argument that sin robs man of the power to control his environment.

Best song: Slow Train – One of the two political songs on Slow Train Coming (the other being “When You Gonna Wake Up?”), this song finds Dylan stereotyping Middle Easterners (“sheiks walkin around like kings, wearin’ fancy jewels and nose rings”), while chiding them for trying to exert influence through oil. The best part, however, is when he attacks corporate farmers for withholding agriculture in order to cut off supply and thus artificially inflate the cost of food. “It costs more to store the food than it do to give it,” he charges, and I’m not sure how grounded in fact what he is saying is, but if it is true, then that’s the kind of righteous judgment I can get behind.

Worst song: Do Right To Me, Baby (Do Unto Others) – While I will support “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” as an intelligent, nuanced argument, this song has nothing deeper than the surface, and the surface isn’t that deep. It has a couple nice almost-jokes and moments of surprise, but they only work at surprising the listener because the majority of it is so damn repetitive and boring. Spooner Oldham does some great playing here, but it doesn’t come close to saving this piece of garbage, and few lines in Dylan’s cannon can compete with the badness of “don’t put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist.”

Best outtake: Trouble In Mind – This song is a close cousin of “Slow Train,” and is the superior song of the two. It has always puzzled me why this wasn’t released. When it was released, they last verse was cut off. The full version is exceedingly hard to get a copy of, and since it has not been rereleased, at least not in the United States to my knowledge, since the original 45 rpm of “Gotta Serve Somebody.”

Notable live version: When He Returns – Dylan’s best singing was arguably during the gospel tours; it was certainly among his most passionate. Check out the melisma that fills the version recorded in Toronto in April of 1980. Originally, Dylan wanted to release a live album of the concert, and even funded its recording, but Columbia felt such a project was ill-fated. The concert is still stuck in the vaults, and many fans feel it the greatest Dylan concert to have not yet seen a proper release.

Rhymes: Turk/network; hair/heir (1-2 from “Gotta Serve Somebody”); enticed/Christ (“Precious Angel”); realistic/statistic; proposition/religion (4-5 from “Slow Train”)

Images: “flesh and blood breaking down” (“Precious Angel”); “Henry Kissinger’s got you tied up in knots” (“When You Gonna Wake Up?”); “as smooth as glass” (“Man Gave Names To All the Animals”); “the iron hand is no match for the iron rod;” “drunk on fear” (4-5 from “When He Returns”)

Axioms: “you may be a preacher with your spiritual pride,… but you’re still gonna have to serve somebody” (“Gotta Serve Somebody”); “the truth’s in our hearts, and we still don’t believe” (“Precious Angel); “the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency;” “they talk about a life of brotherly love; well, show me someone who knows how to live it (3-4 from “Slow Train”); “you got some big dreams, but in order to dream you still gotta be asleep” (When You Gonna Wake Up?”)

Dylan Album Project: Street Legal

2011-11-28T19:40:00.001-08:00

Street Legal (1978)

After several years of frenzied musical activity, Dylan devoted 1977 to editing Renaldo and Clara. He had, by some reports, over 400 hours of film. He edited it down to four hours. Critics lambasted and it is rarely seen today, and when it is it is often the two hour edit. Dylan had combined cinema verite footage with improvised scenes and then cut it up, creating a series of montages. Editing the film proved a major drain in terms of both time and money, and, wxhausted and with a wounded ego, Dylan faced the prospect of needing to go on the road to refill the quickly emptying coffers. The late 70s were a period of excess, so Dylan hired horn players, backup singers, and set off on a tour where people said he’s gone Vegas, or disco. The early live album, At Budokan, is probably my least favorite Dylan album. All of the arrangements re lifeless. Mid tour, Dylan recorded and released Street Legal with the touring band, and you can see why he chose this approach as it works for several songs on the record. Musically, it was an adventure. Dylan was trying new sounds and arrangements, even if a few flopped. The mixing was awful, and it wasn’t until a late 1990s remix that the album finally started to receive praise and be seen as perhaps a minor classic. By the end of the tour, Dylan was supposedly in much better form and rumors occasionally swirl that release of one of the later shows is imminent as an archival live album. Much of the strange mythology was reportedly influenced by a brief interest in Tarot and Robert Graves’ The White Goddess.

Best song: Changing of the Guard – “Sixteen years” is how this starts out, and many fans see it as a sign that, sixteen years into his career, Dylan was about to change the guard by converting to Christianity. Somehow, I don’t think that’s quite it, though religion certainly seems to be a key theme in the song – “torn between Jupiter and Apollo” and “the wheels of fire,” a reference to Ezekiel, point in that direction, though it is certainly not an explicitly or implicitly Christian song.

Worst song: Is Your Love In Vain? – Often decried as Dylan’s most sexist song (the other contender is 1983’s “Sweetheart Like You,” with the line “a woman like you should be at home – that’s where you belong”), this song is mostly derided for the line “can you cook and sew? Make flowers grow? Can you understand my pain?,” which manages to not only stereotype the woman as simply domestic, but also suggests he is the only one in the relationship capable of empathy. In addition to that, it is kind of cloying in its melody.

Best outtake: Several songs were written and performed on the tour, such as “Stepchild” and “Stop Now,” that either never made it into the studio or the outtakes haven’t seen the light of day.

Best live version: “Senor” – This song emanates fear of the apocalypse along the Mexican border, has often been praised for its live performances on the Never-Ending Tour, rare though they are.

Rhymes: nightingale/veil; organization/elimination (1-2 from “Changing of the Guard”); making laws/ breaking of jaws (“No Time to Think”); oxygen/again (“True Love Tends To Forget”); transition/magician (“We Better Talk This Over”)

Images: “a messenger arrived with a black nightingale;” “the stitches still mending beneath a heart-shaped tattoo” (1-2 from “Changing of the Guard”); “a gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring;” “our hearts are as hard as leather” (3-4 from “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)”); “a lonesome bell tone in the valley of stone where she bathed in a stream of pure heat” (“Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat”)

Axioms: “angels voices whisper to the souls of previous times;” “Eden is burning” (1-2 from “Changing of the Guard”); “Mercury rules you and destiny fools you” (“No Time to Think”); “this place just don’t make sense to me no more” (“Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)”); “sacrifice was the code of the road” (“Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat”)

Dylan Album Project: Desire

2011-11-22T17:34:00.000-08:00

Desire (1976)

Still reeling from his divorce from Sara and his impending divorce, Dylan decided to try a few new things and try to reclaim his youthful spirit of authenticity. He cowrote songs for the first time, enlisting Jacque Levy, a playwright mostly known at the time for co-penning the Byrds’ cowboy bestiality fantasy “Chesnut Mare” with Roger McGuinn. He started hanging out in Greenwich Village again, though it was mostly a tourist trap by now. He caught some really early punk acts, drank a lot with people he hadn’t seen before and people he’d just met and started writing cinematic songs in a very different vein than what he had written on Blood On the Tracks. Somewhere around this time, imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter finished writing his autobiography, The Sixteenth Round, in prison and sent a copy to Dylan. Carter had a rap sheet about a mile long for crimes he had committed, but claims he was innocent for the triple murders he’d been sent to prison for. Dylan was moved by the book and went to visit him in prison. They struck a repoire and Dylan agreed to write a song for Carter. “Hurricane,” Dylan’s first protest song since 1973’s “George Jackson,” and the first one Dylan actually cared about since probably The Times They Are A-Changin’, would be a major hit and is seen by many as the centerpiece of Desire. In truth, almost everything in it is a major stretch, some of it is completely fabricated, and the amount of untruth just makes the whole thing ring hollow after you’ve heard it about a hundred times. When I first heard it, it was probably my favorite Dylan song for a year and a half after that, but then its star began to sank, and, while it isn’t my least favorite song on Desire, it isn’t in the top three either. Rather than just raise awareness, though, Dylan wanted to raise money for Carter’s defense fund, and so a tour began to stir in his mind. Any cares about Carter, which I doubt had much influence on Dylan anyway, began to fade a bit as the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan’s greatest tour, began to take shape. It was to be a travelling troupe, a gypsy caravan. The show would feature multiple performers and would have a vaudeville feel to it. The idea of this grand tour swelled. There were seventy-five people on the tour, including writers like Sam Shepard and Allen Ginsberg, a Native American spiritual guru named Rolling Thunder, other folk legends like Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Joan Baez, and a fantastic band, including such contemporary luminaries as David Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson and future luminaries as T-Bone Burnett. Guests such as Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young frequented the tour, sometimes just to hang out and sometimes joining in the action onstage. Dylan even decided to make a film based on the tour, which would eventually become Renaldo and Clara. To go along with the grand tour, he wanted a new sound. One day, while walking around the streets of the village, Dylan came upon a street performer, a gypsy violinist named Scarlet Rivera. He hired her on the spot and her sound came to dominate both the tour and Desire, the album that followed it. The cinematic scope of the songs was influenced by Levy’s eye for screenwriting. They were like epics, or else like Eisensteinian montages. The tour had a grand first leg, announcing concerts just hours before playing them, romping though old gothic theatres in the Northeast. A second leg toured the South in early ’76, but the magic was mostly gone. The tour had changed and things had gone sour. Some great music was made, but it was of a different kind: angrier and less open to what is. As Rolling Thunder began, Sara had briefly reunited with Dylan after walking in on him recording “Sara” and being moved, but by the time the second leg was winding up, she was standing in the wings of huge stadiums holding divorce papers. Desire was recorded early on, and while the songs are more polished, less frenetic and certainly less emphatic than they were on Rolling Thunder, they were still great.

Best song: Black Diamond Bay – A strange frame story populated by a stranger cast. This may be based on a short story – its hard to say – but it certainly has the flavor of literary fiction. Human folly plays out and we are to find it is fruitless against a backdrop of apocalypse. Soviet espionage, homosexual midgets, a French poker dealer and a mysterious woman in white: this song has it all. The story is then revealed to be at two removes, being told by a narrator who is imagining the story based on a newscast by Walter Cronkite.

Worst song: Mozambique – Dylan’s attempt at a pop song. This was released as a pop song, but failed miserably. I was tempted to put “Joey,” an epic eulogy of gangster Joey Gallo, who Dylan seems to have confused with the grandfather in the Werther’s Originals commercials, but at nine minutes, I thought “Joey” just might be too painful to anyone listening to a soundtrack of this monstrosity.

Best outtake: Abandoned Love – This song was debuted at the Bitter End club before the Rolling Thunder Revue started, and has never been played live since. One take was recorded at the Desire sessions, but it wasn’t considered complete. It is a beautiful song though. Inventive, jumping melody with intriguing lyrics. This early, unfinished version is better than several songs that made the album.

Best live version: Isis – “Isis” is a great song on the album, but it is a whole ‘nother beast live. On Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan introduces it as “a song about marriage.” That is true, but truer is when, at other concerts on the tour, he introduced it by saying “this is a true story; actually, they are all true.” It certainly is true, if you read it slant. The song, as I read it, is an allegory for Dylan’s marriage to Sara. He falls in love with her, they marry. He is lured away on a journey to find turquoise and gold, which I would assume is that cash cow that the ’74 tour was seen as. He found it hollow and unfulfilling, and realized the time away was ruining his relationship. Like any good writer, though, he reshapes the ending in his favor – Sara takes him back.

Rhymes: middleweights/out-of-state plates (“Hurricane”); who-knows-when/accordion (“Joey”); cantina/Magdalena (“Romance In Durango”); floor/ambassador; night/Cronkite (4-5 from “Black Diamond Bay”)

Images: “a high place of darkness and light” (“Isis”); “your voice is like a meadowlark” (“One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)”); “hoofbeats like castanets on stone;” “serpent eyes of obsidian” (“3-4 from “Romance In Durango”); “the remnants of her recent past are scattered in the wild wind” (“Black Diamond Bay”)

Axioms: “I still can’t remember all the best things she said;” “when he died I was hopin’ that it wasn’t contagious;” “what drives me to you is what drives me insane” (1-3 from “Isis”); “you can take your money, but I don’t know how you’ll spend it in the tomb” (“Black Diamond Bay”); “a messenger sent me in a tropical storm” (“Sara”)