Bob Dylan (9 page)

 

 

It no longer makes much sense for me to see Dylan’s career in terms of progression; to look for a point of view refining or growing or slipping from year to year; to see a style at work in and against a changing world. All that is there, but somehow it’s not very interesting. What sticks in my mind are a handful of songs—“All Along the Watchtower,” “Down the Highway,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Highway 61 Revisited”—and a feeling for how tough they are. For the moment, the rest slips away, just as it did at the shows. There is much that does not and may never reach me on
Planet Waves,
but “Wedding Song,” for one, sounds more to me like the real ending of
John Wesley Harding
than it sounds like anything else. If the question What does it all mean? is worth asking about Dylan’s performance—it’s usually worth asking about anything—this might be part of it.

A man goes out into the world; he is bedeviled by its traps, seduced by its delights. If he is a fool he is determined not to remain one; he tries to read the signs God and the devil have scattered in the world, and he builds slowly toward a moral stance. He makes choices, and suffers by them, and grows both stronger and more wary. He tries to get across what he has learned to the crowd, but finds they don’t listen too well; whether they do or not, he feels he has at least told the truth. Finally he returns home and meets his wife, down there at the cove, and the two of them take off to have a drink, to make love, to get some rest. He’s worked hard, and he’s earned his reward. That to me is the story told in
John Wesley Harding,
but there is one more tale to tell, the story Dylan has been working on since that time, a story he now seems to have focused on one tune.

“Wedding Song” says that all the struggles of the world are present in the reward as well; the struggle only shifts to another plane. I think Dylan was trying to get across such a sense of struggle and reward on
Planet Waves,
and that he didn’t make it, because he has been out of the world too long, and the songs remain too personal. One verse of “Wedding Song” seems to claim that a man must reject the world to keep faith with his private struggle (typically, Dylan sings the line “But I love you more than all of that” with such grace he can make you believe the world must be abandoned); alongside of all the other love songs on
Planet Waves,
the last one can stay in that prison. But if the tune really does complete the story of
John Wesley Harding,
and if it’s heard that way, you might learn that the struggle in the world only deepens the struggle at home; that in some mysterious way, each struggle justifies the other.

Since making
Planet Waves
Dylan has been all over the world. It is hard to believe the vital performances he gave are only a prelude to another effective retirement; it is impossible to believe that the vitality he must have received from the audience will not find its way into new songs as strong as those he shot off the stage. Elliot Murphy, who was there in the audience with everybody else, tells a story that I think makes sense out of the stakes of Bob Dylan’s tour: “When I got together with Polydor, we went out to California to do an album with Leon Russell on piano, Jim Gordon on drums, and Dr. John on organ. I was out there and it just wasn’t going right at all. One night I was eating dinner with my brother at a restaurant and really feeling down about the way the album would end up and thinking I wouldn’t know who I was. Suddenly my brother starts pointing across the table and his face is turning white. These booths were arranged so you were almost sitting back to back with people. I turned around and looked at what he was pointing at, and that second the guy in back of me turns around and I’m nose to nose with Bob Dylan. For some reason that gave me strength and I went into the studio and told the producer to forget it. I came back to New York and we did it right.”

Bob Dylan, like Murphy or the rest of us, needs other people from whom he can draw strength, who can inspire him and with whom he can struggle. This time, Dylan went to us, and it should make a difference.

 

Planet Waves
(Asylum, 1974).

June 1974

 

Since I wrote the report on the Oakland Dylan-Band concerts that appeared in the last issue, my crafty brother Steve has come up with a good, rough tape of one of the shows, which suggests a footnote both on the concerts and the live album that is presumably set to follow.

The tape makes clear that nearly everything good I had to say about the performances ought to be raised to the tenth power. The music was wilder than I remembered, and Dylan’s singing more exciting. Though musically very different, I haven’t the slightest doubt that what Dylan and the Band did in 1974 was as memorable as what Dylan and the Hawks did in 1965 and ’66, or that a live album drawn from the tour should burn with all the force of the classic
Live at Albert Hall
bootleg, and carry with it an altogether new kind of humor and confidence. I wasn’t sure, writing about the concerts, if the music would come across on record—Dylan’s presence, and the Band’s, was part of it all, perhaps an essential part. The tape proves that I was wrong. The music is potent in ways I haven’t even hinted at. It may be that Dylan’s presence, though part of the music, also overshadowed it.

It’s possible that none of this will survive on official vinyl—not if Dylan, Robertson, or whoever else will be involved in producing the live album give in to the natural temptation to tone down and
refine what was in fact a brash and unruly performance. If you insist on getting perfect stereo separation when you record an earthquake, you may produce a more professional product, but it won’t sound like an earthquake. Too much precision, too much balance, mixing down the Band and mixing up Dylan—as Bob Johnston did on the Isle of Wight cuts on
Self Portrait
—will take the life out of the music. So, a plea: go for the total sound, even if it means you have to leak tracks all over the studio. Try and keep the momentum of the music. Let some distortion and confusion bleed through the songs, as it did when they were played. If you have to put anything in front, make it the drums.

And don’t wait until Christmas.

City
24 July-6 Aug 1974
with
Dylan/Band
Village Voice
15 August 1974

 

Before the Flood
(and what does that mean? A natural correlate to
Planet Waves?
Après moi le déluge?), the live album from the grand tour Bob Dylan and the Band made last winter, taped almost entirely on the last night, in Los Angeles, may turn out to be the least played Dylan record since
Self Portrait.
The press is that Dylan’s singing is mannered and emotionless; that the music is sloppy and perfunctory; that the use of old songs is both a failed attempt to recreate a glorious past and an admission that Dylan cannot create in the present; that he no longer has any real relationship to the generation he helped recognize itself. It is said that at best the album
is a substitution of physical energy for the imagination and innovation of better days.

Dylan’s generation dissolved as its members grew up. Dylan, quite some time ago, turned his back on his putative generation, just as he abandoned the strictures of his old styles, and joined a bigger, more complex America. These days, anyone who writes about Dylan’s audience as us is using a very ambiguous word, or a very outdated one. Dylan now performs as an American artist, not a generational symbol.
John Wesley Harding
was a deeply intellectual exploration of what it meant to be an American artist, expressed in both words and music;
Before the Flood
offers not ideas but passions, and its ambitions are the same. The old context has crumbled—Paul Nelson is right when he says that in Dylan’s new music the center will not hold, but the center is not in the music but in the country itself. The triumph of Dylan’s new music is that Dylan seems to take the failure of the center—and, in terms of any our-generation, the failure of the edges—as an opportunity for freedom. If the failure is a fact, it is an exhilarating fact.

This is what I hear. Since I saw Dylan and the Band on their tour, and since
Before the Flood
was released, I have had no interest in the new music as part of Dylan’s history, or as a part of ours. Perhaps it’s not the context that’s shattered; perhaps it’s the music itself that blows the context apart. But I care about this music as incident—I am intrigued by the simple aesthetic fact of six men on a stage saying their piece, and leaving.

When I listen to the radio today, I hear Paul McCartney, Elton John. At home I play Steely Dan’s
Pretzel Logic,
Roxy Music’s
Stranded,
and Roxy singer Bryan Ferry’s strange new oldies album,
These Foolish Things
(he does “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”; he also does “It’s My Party”).
Before the Flood
exposes the calculation of these records. They are so well-made, either in terms of simple production (Paul and Elton) or a whole vision of popular culture (Steely Dan, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry) that they leave almost no room for the listener to create. The tension between musicians and
audience is proscribed; your responses have been figured out, and if the artist is good at his job, you go where he wants you to go.

There’s nothing wrong with this. You get to a lot of interesting places. On one level, such means and ends are the essence of popular art. Critics bowing to Alfred Hitchcock have been claiming for years that the perfection of manipulation is all there is to it. But great popular art, like great rock ’n’ roll, takes an audience—and, since we are talking about popular art, ultimately the artist as well—to places the artist glimpsed only by instinct, if at all.

I feel many good things when I watch Hitchcock or listen to Bryan Ferry, but I never feel free. What I miss is the sense of open possibility, the exhilaration, one gets from
Jules and Jim, Blonde on Blonde,
or
Weekend
—the feeling that an artist is working over his head, that you are in over yours, that limits have been trashed. This kind of freedom—when you’re in the presence of an artist liberating himself from his form, you feel free—makes
Jules and Jim
a much more dangerous movie than
Shadow of a Doubt,
just as
Before the Flood
is funnier and more painful than Ferry’s
These Foolish Things,
which has had me laughing and misting up for months.

I miss the sense that there is more to music, or to an artist, to myself, than I’d guessed, that when a song comes on the radio or goes on the turntable I can’t predict what it will do to me. I miss the feeling of musicians diving into a performance without much idea of what route they are traveling, let alone of where they are going to come out, but with the good-humored, nervous conviction that the trip will return in surprise whatever it costs in uncertainty.

Dylan and the Band’s music on
Before the Flood
was made in this spirit—a particularly American spirit. The best of it is brawling, crude, not completely civilized, an old-fashioned, back-country, big-city attack on all things genteel. There’s a lot of Whitman’s YAWP in this music. “The European moderns,” D. H. Lawrence wrote fifty years ago, “are all
trying
to be extreme. The great Americans I mention” (Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman) “just were it.”

I listened seriously, carefully, and constantly to this album, not enjoying it particularly, feeling put off by what seemed to be a
one-dimensional, overly straightforward performance, until in the middle of “Highway 61 Revisited,” right where Dylan is singing “Do you know where I can get rid of these things?” I caught Robbie Robertson tossing off two little noises—Awk! Awk!—and then flipping back to the main drift of the song with a combination of notes unlike anything I had ever heard. I couldn’t believe it—he made it obvious that every other guitar player in America has webbed fingers—or that he has twelve. So I called him up, to find out how this music was made, how the riff was worked into place, what its purpose was in the structure of the song, and so on. “Yes,” he said. “A moment of panic.”

That moment made the album for me, opened it up: panic perhaps, but no accident, because now I could cite dozens of moments like it. Those few notes cracked the textures of the music, provided a way into its density. Within those textures are a fabulous collection of nuances, phrases, lyric fragments, pieces that seem to matter more than finished songs. Pieces shoot out of a song you’ve heard dozens of times and make new claims on your ability to respond. The music may be all familiarity on the surface (old songs), or beneath the surface (bought the album, took it home, played it), but you never get to the bottom. The sound of the recording—rough, blurry, fast, dark—hides the action at first, and may even make some tunes sound bland. After a time, strange incidents begin to poke through, all the more powerful because you were sure they weren’t there. Then everything falls into place. A few days later you hear something different; the performance shatters; it rebuilds itself around that moment, and shifts again.

This kind of freedom—six men running wild within a structure that still keeps its shape, that is never incoherent or arbitrary—seems to be what is authentically new about this music, as well as what is best about it. The density of the music creates new space; I hear Garth Hudson as the star of this record, just as I heard Levon Helm as the star of the show. Neither man would have played with the fire he did without Dylan driving him past himself; that Garth Hudson can overshadow Dylan here is the album’s success, not its failure.

The Band didn’t play this way with Dylan when they toured as the Hawks in 1965 and ’66, nor have they played this way on their own since. In the past, they backed Dylan, and he sang as if that was just how he wanted it. The coverage of the recent tour fell into these expectations. Writers spoke often of the excellent “fills” Robbie, Garth, and Richard Manuel provided, or the fine rhythms Levon Helm and Rick Danko came up with.
Before the Flood
makes such commentary ridiculous. Garth handles the rhythm; sometimes Levon seizes the story. There are whole songs in what Garth does on “Highway 61 Revisited,” in Levon’s drumming on “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”—complete, crazily intricate versions of what these songs are all about.