Bob Dylan (37 page)

The fourteen-person band was heading toward cuteness when Garth Hudson began to play. He was everywhere at once. As soon as you thought you caught a tune—“Home Sweet Home,” “Shenandoah”—it vanished. He was an avant-garde pianist in a 1915 grind
house, forgotten girlie flicks and In-a-castle-dark epics turning profound under his fingers. And then, like a sermon, came a low, thick, unbending voice from the back of the stage, insisting on the Great Depression as God’s will, punishment for sins unknown, even uncommitted, and insisting on the only solution, which was suicide. “I’m going where there’s no Depression,” as the Carter Family sang in 1936, on their way to heaven. “There’ll be no hunger, no orphan children crying for bread / No weeping widows, toil or struggle.” The singer was Maud Hudson, and when, with absolute dignity, she reached the lines “No shrouds, no coffins / And no death,” you realized the song was calling for nothing so small as the end of a life, but for the end of the natural order: the end of the world.

 

 

Salon
14 May 2001

 

Special Absurdity of Worldwide Commemoration of Bob Dylan’s May 24 60th Birthday Edition!

 

1) This column has been unable to confirm a report that at his May 1 concert in Asheville, N.C., Bob Dylan performed his Oscar
^®
winning song, “Things Have Changed,” with the Thing Itself prominently displayed on a speaker cabinet. True or false, the story doesn’t touch the night Michael Richards showed up on
The Tonight Show
wearing his new
Seinfeld
Emmy as a necklace.

 

2/3) Bob Dylan: “You Belong to Me” on
Natural Born Killers—A Soundtrack to an Oliver Stone Film,
produced by Trent Reznor (nothing/Interscope, 1994) and “Return to Me” on
The Sopranos: Peppers & Eggs—Music from the HBO Original Series
(Sony). Listening to his startlingly gentle version of “You Belong to Me” on the
Natural Born Killers
soundtrack, you could figure that Jo Stafford would have smiled at Dylan’s cover of her 1952 smash, her biggest record. And you can imagine what Dean Martin would have to say about this cover of his 1958 smash—and his best
record. Probably he wouldn’t say anything, just give Dylan the same sneer Robert Mitchum gives Johnny Depp in Jim Jarmusch’s
Dead Man.
A look that says, “Are you still here?”

 

4)
A Nod to Bob: An Artists’ Tribute to Bob Dylan on His Sixtieth Birthday
(Red House). Suzzy and Maggie Roche can’t help letting you know how clever they were to choose “Clothesline Saga,” one of Dylan’s coolest songs—and their bohemian posing stands out as rock ’n’ roll raunch on this collection of bored and pious folkie tributes, most of which somehow project condescension through the veil of homage. But if you’re ever yearned to hear “I Want You” done as a prayer, this is for you.

 

5) New Dylan Alert! Robbie Fulks:
Couples in Trouble
(Boondoggle). Fulks has an uncanny ability to write songs as if they were remembered from a previous life—a life lived in England in the 17th century. This album leads off with “In Bristol Town One Bright Day”—“A stranger he came calling,” that other person says through Fulks. It’s a new—or unfound—version of “The Daemon Lover,” dripping blood: “And on his lips the strangest words seemed so meek and common.” You want a warning? That’s a fire alarm. This is the sort of song Dylan would be sneaking into his shows next week, if he hadn’t already recorded it as “House Carpenter” (1962, on
the bootleg series, volumes 1-3
) and “Blackjack Davey” (in 1992, on
Good As I Been to You
). As for Fulks, the rest of the record is Don McLean in loud clothes.

 

6)
Duluth Does Dylan
(Spinout). Bands who still live where Bob Dylan was born dive in with no respect and come out sounding as young as they are. Not all of it is good, and some of it’s horrible, but little is predictable—not Chris Monroe’s deep winter cover drawing, the First Ladies’ wasted “Father of Night,” or the way the chorus of “Like a Rolling Stone” keeps surfacing in the Black Labels’
Where did you say we are? And who are you, anyway?
reading of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” Everybody must get stoned, like a rolling stone—why didn’t anyone think of that before?

7) Old New Dylan Alert! Bob Marley & the Wailers:
Catch a Fire: Deluxe Edition
(Tuff Gong/Island). Before releasing the Jamaican sessions that made up this 1972 album—songs included “Stir It Up,” “Kinky Reggae,” “400 Years,” “Slave Driver,” and “Stop That Train”—producer and label owner Chris Blackwell had some overdubbing done in London. This set presents the originals—including two numbers left unrevised and unissued—on one disc, plus, on a second,
Catch a Fire
as it almost, but not quite, caught fire around the world.

“Concrete Jungle”—here in its first form as a Jamaican single—was always the test between the real thing and its adulteration. This profound protest against the specific political and economic realities of Jamaica in the moment, and against the weight of history, of slavery, pressing down like an elephant’s foot every time the singer tried to think, speak or act, is smaller as the Wailers made it on their own—spare, the sound open, the backing vocals word-by-word clear. Despite the backing singers, and the careful, impeccable rhythm of the band, this is one man’s testament, a work of dignity.

In London, John “Rabbit” Bundrick of Texas added organ, and Wayne Perkins of Alabama added guitar; the backing vocals were muffled, and somehow given even greater presence. There is a long, slow introduction, Perkins edging his way into the theme like a stranger trying to walk into a bar without anybody noticing, though after one turn into the music he’s got his money out. Aston Barrett’s bass, a counter in Jamaica, is huge here; as much as Bundrick’s Garth Hudson-like tentacles, it’s this that makes a mood in which you can’t tell curse from judgment, the future from too late. Straight off, the sound puts everything in doubt, and everyone on the record in jeopardy.

As the song goes on, the backing singers seem to circle Marley’s lead, pointing at him, smiling, frowning, offering approval, withholding it, and soon the prosaic has vanished from the performance: the crying chorus is made up of the “many thousands gone” of “No More Auction Block.” “Where Dead Voices Gather,” Nick Tosches calls his forthcoming book on 1920s blackface minstrel
Emmett Miller; this remixed “Concrete Jungle” is one place they gather.

All through the progression of the song, Perkins has been waiting, offering up a sign or a riff, a comment or a counterpoint, like the man in the bar looking a split-second too long at the guy who seems to own the place, holding his glass in a way not quite the same as anyone else, calling another drink with words that are English but sound like Spanish. As Marley steps back, then, Perkins steps in. The solo he plays is so restrained in form, and so passionate in tone, it translates the pain of Marley’s story into a dream beyond words or even images. It is a dream of flight, of the running man trapped, escaping only to be trapped again, until, in a shocking moment, the solo turns over, and turns back on itself, as if to say, this record will end, but the story can’t end. Not well; not even badly. And you can’t wait it out. “400 Years”? You thought that meant from then to now, but it means from now to then.

 

8) Bob Dylan:
Live: 1961-2000: Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances
(Sony Japan). Sixteen tracks, from “Wade in the Water,” taped in 1961 in Minneapolis, to “Things Have Changed,” from Portsmouth, England, last year. Killer: “Dead Man, Dead Man,” studio version on
Shot of Love,
1981. Taped in New Orleans that same year, “Dead Man” is a textbook warning against the devil, if you listen as if you’re reading; if you hear it, it’s a poker game, and the singer’s winning.

 

9) Pre-Dylan Alert! Robert Cantwell: “Darkling I Listen: Making Sense of the
Folkways Anthology,
” talk at Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (Getty Center, Los Angeles, 20 April 2001).
¹⁷
About old American music, as first recorded in the 1920s and assembled by Smith in 1952 as his anthology
American

Folk Music
—which, given the degree to which he absorbed it, in the late fifties and early sixties might have been Bob Dylan’s pillow. The records were not quite the songs, and the performances of the songs were not quite the songs either, Cantwell argued: when seven decades ago those who Dylan once called “the traditional people” faced new machines, what resulted were “thought experiments, science fictions—newer than new, as it were, and older than old. They lead us, finally, to the
Anthology
’s central mystery: How can
these
performances have found their way to
those
records? Or better, these records to those performances?—questions that would not arise at all were it not for the still deeper question with which Harry has confronted us:
What is a record?
”

With the strange old sounds (“It is the sound of the old records we have, not the records themselves”), Cantwell said, Smith “placed us roughly where the listeners to Edison’s phonograph were, phenomenologically speaking, in the early weeks of its public unveiling, when, according to the editor of the
Scientific American,
‘the machine inquired as to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that [it] was very well, and bid a cordial good-night. ’ At succeeding demonstrations young women fainted; eminent scientific heads were convinced it was a trick of ventriloquism; a Yale professor pronounced it a flat-out hoax. What was this machine that could steal the human voice? That could make absent people present—or was it that it rendered present people absent? That immortalized the human voice, but at the same time abolished it? What can one say of a machine that brings the dead back to life, but in the same instant buries them again?” No one has ever come closer to rendering Smith’s selections—the likes of the Alabama Sacred Heart Singers’ “Rocky Road” or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”—in mere words, as opposed to, as with Dylan’s versions of the latter, on his first album in 1962, and in the basement tapes sessions five years later, more recordings.

 

10) Anonymous Dylan fan (e-mail, May 7). “Bob birthday blast of coverage reminds me of fifties country song—
I forgot to remember to forget
—except updated—
I forgot, then remembered then forgot
then remembered then remembered why I never should have forgotten in the first place.
”

20 May 2001

 

Richard Fariña died in a motorcycle accident near Carmel on 20 April 1966, just following a party celebrating the publication of his first novel,
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me;
he was just twenty-nine. A musician, songwriter, singer, and fabulist as well as a novelist, he seduced many people in life, and many in death. David Hajdu, author of the well-received biography of Billy Strayhorn, the Duke Ellington collaborator, is one of the latter.

“Who reveled in the act of living more than this man who tried to make every meal a banquet, every task a mission, every conversation a play, every gathering a party?” Hajdu asks in
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.
“Being with Dick was a feeling,” a Carmel friend said. “It wasn’t something outside of you that you looked at or saw. It was something that went through you.” Thomas Pynchon, friend from college and ever after, worshiped him. Women could not resist. Did Fariña truly carry out secret missions for the IRA, as he claimed? We will never know.

A little of this goes a long way. Hajdu bets that a life unlived—cut short—a life unsullied by failure, decline, or betrayal, can overshadow lives that were lived, that went on past the golden moment when all things seemed possible, i.e., the world of American folk music from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s.

In this story, the Cambridge folk singer Joan Baez, who from the time of the release of her first album in 1960 was for many the embodiment of a moral purity that could not be found in American society as it advertised itself, and her younger sister, guitarist
Mimi Baez, Fariña’s second wife, function as confused, manipulated, lovesick women caught between two powerful men.

On the side of life there is Fariña, from Brooklyn, handsome, exotic (his father Cuban, his mother Irish), a deep male friend, a capricious lover, dedicated to laughter and to his art. On the side of death there is singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, “a Jewish kid from the suburbs.”

He is profoundly talented, but principally as a thief; he is able to ride the times as if they were a horse, even to become the voice of a generation, without ever truly engaging with the times, his eye always on the way out. As a person he is distant, less a comrade in the folk milieu than a spy; he is sour, “pallid and soft . . . child-like, almost feminine,” “a little spastic gnome”—“that little toad,” as Baez describes him to Hajdu. And without Fariña—who, a friend recalls, conceived the idea of merging folk with rock (“Dick said, ‘We should start a whole new genre. Poetry set to music, but not chamber music or beatnik jazz, man—music with a beat. Poetry you can dance to. Boogie poetry!’”)—Dylan would have had no career: not even the remarkable idea of carrying around a notebook in which to write down ideas, “as Richard Fariña had been doing since college.” “Fariña gave Bob this lecture,” the folk singer Fred Neil tells Hajdu, as Fariña told others: “‘If you want to be a songwriter, man, you’d better find yourself a singer.’ You see,” Neil says, “Bob and me, we were both writing, but I knew how to sing. Fariña told him straight, ‘Man, what you need to do, man, is hook up with Joan Baez. She is so square, she isn’t in this century. She needs you to bring her into the twentieth century, and you need somebody like her to do your songs. She’s your ticket, man. All you need to do, man, is start screwing Joan Baez.’” It was 1961, in New York; by 1963, it would be true. They sang together; they slept together. And of course it was a freak show: “As soloists, each of them had always had a public image that was elementally desexualized and androgynous—Joan the virgin enchantress, Bob the boy poet,” Hajdu writes. “The idea of either of them sexually engaged was not so much titillating as it was startling and puzzling: How will
this
work?”