Dylan Album Project: "Love and Theft"

“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

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

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

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.