Bob Dylan (10 page)

The performance is so rough it makes the Rolling Stones’ live music sound polite, and yet the music Dylan and the Band make together is more complex, in an emotional sense, than the lyrics of the songs that are being played. This freedom—the way that the singers and musicians have freed themselves from the songs as artifacts—has something to do with the fact that Dylan and the Band are older than they were when they first played this music; they have less to prove to each other and more to say for themselves. They can take their partnership for granted, and build on it. They can be thrilled by the crowd and forget it, all at once.

Listen to the original version of “Highway 61 Revisited,” from the album of the same name, made back in 1965; you hear a very laconic Bob Dylan, a dandy, casually describing events of incredible strangeness, as if to say,
Well, what
else
would you expect from a place like the U.S.A.?
But on
Before the Flood
it’s a different story.
You wouldn’t
believe
what’s happening on Highway 61,
the singer is saying—
and we’re going to take you out and show you, whether you’re ready or not.

Once, Bob Dylan cruised the strip with a cool eye, keeping his distance. Now, he’s right in the middle, and so are we. You hear Garth Hudson waltzing you down the road, making you feel as if it’s going to be a pleasant, Tom Sawyer sort of trip, and then suddenly he’s calling down from the mountain, Gabriel bent on Judgment Day, and yes, you’d better run, if only to keep up. That is the
burden
of joining a bigger, more mysterious America, of abandoning the comforts of my-generation. And to enter the center that will not hold, to affirm it, to do one’s work there—that is not, I think, a harmless act.

 

 

Dylan’s tour with the Band was not an event, regardless of what
Newsweek
and
Rolling Stone
said, regardless that whole books on the tour are in the stores; as an event, the tour vanished in its own smoke. Elton’s John’s
Caribou
and
Before the Flood
were released simultaneously;
Caribou
is already number one, while Dylan and the Band are not even in the top twenty. Apparently the 450,000 people who came to see the show do not even need a souvenir.
⁵
Asylum must have believed its own hype, because they put
Before the Flood
on the market without ads. Now, hysterically, they are adding more hype: “The greatest tour in rock and roll history...”

Nonsense. Unlike Dylan’s tours in the mid-sixties, the Band’s debut in the spring of 1969, the Rolling Stones’ climactic dash across the continent later that year, or Elvis’s first appearances on television in 1956, this tour did not draw in the desires and fears and symbols that changed and deepened the public life we share through performers who matter to us. Dylan’s tour was an opportunity for music, a chance for six people to break through the limits with which they’d surrounded themselves. Together, they pulled that off, and within the music they made and left behind on record, there is a chance for any fan to break through some of his or her own limits. Most other music will sound careful, hedged, and a bit false after
Before the Flood
—that may be why I haven’t heard a single cut from the album on the radio since it was released.

 

Bob Dylan,
Before the Flood
(Asylum, 1974).

 

———.
the bootleg series volume 4—Bob Dylan Live 1966—The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert
(Columbia, 1998).

5-18 February 1975
⁶

 

Bob Dylan wasn’t kidding when he called his new album
Blood on the Tracks
—the songs are covered with it. “Warn all gentle and fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book,” Herman Melville wrote of
Moby-Dick,
full of delight at his work and full of worry at its reception; Dylan has a right to feel the same.
Blood on the Tracks
is an album of wounds: at once the tale of an adventurer’s war with a woman and with himself, and a shattering attempt to force memory, fantasy, and the terrors of love and death to serve an artist’s impulse to redeem disaster by making beauty out of it.

It is a great record: dark, pessimistic, and discomforting, roughly made, and filled with a deeper kind of pain than Dylan has ever revealed. And while there are echoes of Dylan’s earlier work on
Blood on the Tracks
(for its themes,
Another Side of Bob Dylan;
for its unity,
John Wesley Harding;
for its singing,
Before the Flood
), the only thing about Bob Dylan that could have prepared his audience for this music is his refusal ever to be pinned down.

Dylan is offering a fiction here, but he assumes the central role, kicking off his story with “Tangled Up in Blue,” a cracked narrative that introduces us to the hero of
Blood on the Tracks
and to the woman he will pursue, abandon, damn, lose and lose again, right through to the album’s end, nearly an hour later. Save for “You’re Gonna Make Me Miss You When You Go,” the album’s one certifiable stinker, the songs are as good as any Dylan has ever written—every one of them different, and all of a piece.

This is classic American songwriting, as plain and mysterious as twenties country music, thirties blues, or fifties rock ’n’ roll—stuff like the Carter Family’s “Worried Man Blues,” Buell Kazee’s “East Virginia,” Jimmie Rodgers’s blue yodels, Rabbit Brown’s “James Alley Blues,” Willie Brown’s “Future Blues,” Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Eyesight to the Blind,” Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love.” These songs are as obvious and unsettling as weather; no one can fail to understand them, and no one can get to the bottom of them, either.
Blood on the Tracks
is no different.

The backing on the album is merely functional, undistinguished save for Dylan’s harmonica, and his guitar on “Buckets of Rain” (he does nothing Ry Cooder couldn’t do, but Cooder couldn’t play with so much soul if he practiced for a hundred years). The music on the best Dylan records has always been special (think of Charlie McCoy’s bass on
John Wesley Harding
or Kenny Buttrey’s drumming on “Absolutely Sweet Marie”), and I miss that.

Because the music here doesn’t grab you from across the room, you may have to sit down and listen before you find your way into the songs. The album isn’t inaccessible, but it makes demands. You have to bring something to the music before you catch the way Dylan will lead with what might be his worst lines, and then put you away:

One mask of the adventurer fades into another: the perennial innocent of “Tangled Up in Blue” becomes the accuser of “Idiot Wind,” the boozy blues spirit of “Meet Me in the Morning” the fantasist of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” the loser of “Shelter from the Storm” the wasted survivor of “Buckets of Rain.” And if there is a story line running through these songs, and I think there is—the odyssey of a mythical lover possessed by an affair he can never resolve—then “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” is at the center of the album. The Jack of Hearts is the secret hero the narrator would be if he could: the dark stranger who sweeps into town, turns it upside down, and makes off with the love of its women and its money to boot before anyone can get a clear look at his face, or his heart. Before and after come the songs of the man as he is: the one who sought shelter from the storm, found it, and lost it.

As he has done before, Dylan has dismissed the whole pop scene by releasing an album that cuts right through it.
Blood on the Tracks
reveals the emptiness and the failure of nerve of the records that these days pass for genius; it stakes a claim to its own voice, and for as long as the album lasts, that voice is a whole world.
Blood on the Tracks
proves that Dylan is a pathfinder because in the middle of the city he can discover forgotten streets and make them new.

Most of all, though, I like the way he says “Delacroix.”

 

Bob Dylan,
Blood on the Tracks
(Columbia, 1975).

Bob Dylan & the Band

The Basement Tapes
(Columbia)

1975

 

... with a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it . . . you may have to lean forward a little.

 

In 1965 and 1966 Bob Dylan and the Hawks played their way across the country and then around the world. Those rough tours pushed Bob Dylan’s music, and the Band’s, to a certain limit, and they had made a stand-up, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-asked music if there ever was such a thing. In the summer of 1967 Dylan and the Band were after something else.

Neither
John Wesley Harding,
made later that year, nor
Music from Big Pink
(for which all of the Band’s numbers here were at one time intended) sound much like
The Basement Tapes,
but there are two elements the three sessions do share: a feeling of age, a kind of classicism, and an absolute commitment by the singers and musicians to their material. Beneath the easy rolling surface of
The Basement Tapes,
there is some serious business going on. What was taking shape, as Dylan and the Band fiddled with the tunes, was less a style than a spirit—a spirit that had to do with a delight in friendship and invention.

As you first listen to the music they made, you’ll be hard put to pin it down, and likely not too interested in doing so. What matters is Rick Danko’s loping bass on “Yazoo Street Scandal”; Garth Hudson’s omnipresent merry-go-round organ playing (never more evocative than it is on “Apple Sucking Tree”); the slow, uncoiling menace of “This Wheel’s on Fire”; Bob Dylan’s singing, as sly as Jerry Lee Lewis, and as knowing as the old man in the mountains.

There’s the kind of love song only Richard Manuel can pull off, the irresistibly pretty “Katie’s Been Gone”; there is the unassuming
passion of the Band’s magnificent “Ain’t No More Cane,” an old chain gang song that ought to be a revelation to anyone who has ever cared about the Band’s music, because the performance seems to capture the essence of what they have always meant to be. There’s the lovely idea of “Bessie Smith,” written and sung by Robbie Robertson and Rick as the plaint of one of Bessie’s lovers, who can’t figure out if he’s lost his heart to the woman herself or the way she sings. There is Levon Helm’s patented mixture of carnal bewilderment and helpless delight in “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” (and the solos he and Robbie stomp out on that tune)—and the tale he tells in “Yazoo Street Scandal,” a comic horror story wherein the singer is introduced, by his girlfriend, to the local Dark Lady, who promptly seduces him, and then scares him half to death.

The Basement Tapes,
more than any other music that has been heard from Bob Dylan and the Band, sound like the music of a partnership. As Dylan and the Band trade vocals across the discs, as they trade nuances and phrases within the songs, you can feel the warmth and the comradeship that must have been liberating for all six men. Language, for one thing, is completely unfettered. A good number of the songs seem as cryptic, or as nonsensical, as a misnumbered crossword puzzle—that is, if you listen only for words, and not for what the singing and the music say—but the open spirit of the songs is as straightforward as their unmatched vitality and spunk.

One hears a pure, naked emotion in some of Dylan’s writing and singing—in “Tears of Rage,” especially—that can’t be found anywhere else, and I think it is the musical sympathy Dylan and the Band shared in these sessions that gives “Tears of Rage,” and other numbers, their remarkable depth and power. There are rhythms in the music that literally sing with compliments tossed from one musician to another—listen to “Lo and Behold!” “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” “Ain’t No More Cane.” And there is another kind of openness, a flair for ribaldry that’s as much a matter of Levon’s mandolin as his, or Dylan’s, singing—a spirit that shoots a good smile straight across this album.

More than a little crazy, at times flatly bizarre (take “Million Dollar Bash,” “Yazoo Street Scandal,” “Don’t Ya Tell Henry,” “Lo and Behold!”), moving easily from the confessional to the bawdy house, roaring with humor and good times, this music sounds to me at once like a testing and a discovery—of musical affinity, of nerve, of some very pointed themes; put up or shut up, obligation, escape, homecoming, owning up, the settling of accounts past due.

It sounds as well like a testing and a discovery of memory and roots.
The Basement Tapes
are a kaleidoscope like nothing I know, complete and no more dated than the mail, but they seem to leap out of a kaleidoscope of American music no less immediate for its venerability. Just below the surface of songs like “Lo and Behold!” or “Million Dollar Bash” are the strange adventures and poker-faced insanities chronicled in such standards as “Froggy Went A-Courtin’,” “E-ri-e,” Henry Thomas’s “Fishing Blues,” “Cock Robin,” or “Five Nights Drunk”; the ghost of Rabbit Brown’s sardonic “James Alley Blues” might lie just behind “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood).”
The Basement Tapes
summon sea chanteys, drinking songs, tall tales, and early rock and roll.

Alongside of such things—and often intertwined with them—is something very different.