That Bob Dylan‘s new album -- “Love and Theft,” his 43rd and
among his best -- was released on the day of the terrorist attacks on
New York and Washington is of course a meaningless coincidence, yet one
that begs mention. Dylan has filled his music with Apocalypse for a
long, long time, and the canon is chockablock with verses that seem to
presage September 11 and the new world disorder:
Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon The handmade blade, the child’s balloon Eclipses both the sun and moon . . . for instance, from that old
toe-tapper “It‘s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Later on, when he
got borned again, Dylan had more specific, less poetic things to say on
the subject -- as in San Francisco, on the night of November 25, 1979.
The world as we know it now is being destroyed . . . In a short time -- I don‘t know, in three years, maybe five years, could be 10 years, I don’t know -- there‘s gonna be a war. It’s gonna be called the War of Armageddon. It‘s gonna be in the Middle East. Russia’s gonna come down first . . . Though he seems to have moved
on from this particular point of view, he is still steeped in and a
habitual bearer of bad news -- which, in the curved world of Bob, is
often indistinguishable from good news. There‘s a point where good and
bad meet, where the love songs are full of hate and the hate songs are
full of love, and there’s no telling them apart, and it‘s all just life
(and life only). “Love and Theft”
is a dark album in the guise of a light album, and the tension between
the two makes the engine go. It is, on the face of it, sunny and
rollicking and rendered mostly in a major key. (The carnival-creepy
“Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” which opens the disc, is a notable
exception, but it does have a good beat, and you can dance to it.) Even
the blues are buoyant. The album is full of jokes, many of the
grade-school kind Dylan’s been rehearsing as onstage patter over the
past couple of years (“Well, I‘m sitting on my watch/So I can be on
time”). Yet there is a dark streak of violence that runs through it:
Tears are falling everywhere. God is around, lurking or Lording, but
he’s a Lord with a sword. “I‘m preaching the word of God,” singeth the
singer. “I’m putting out your eyes.” Leaves are rustling in the wood,
things are falling off the shelf. The bucolic charms of a country
twilight (“The dusky light the day is losing/Orchids, poppies,
black-eyed susan”) turn morbid in the next line: “The earth and sky
that melts with flesh and bone.” But I say this as if it‘s a bad thing,
when for Dylan it clearly is not. “I’m drowning in the poison, got no
future, got no past,” Dylan sings in “Mississippi,” “but my heart is
not weary, it‘s light and it’s free.”
I think that this is a great
album. It feels like a great album, holding up handily to repeated
listenings, both close and ambient. It transmits the confidence of its
maker; it swaggers more than a little. (Produced by Dylan himself,
pseudonymously, and recorded with his touring band, it has a familiar
easiness, and a live kick.) That‘s partly a matter of attitude -- of
seriousness, of sophistication (of a very subtle sort), of
expressiveness and the sense that something actual is happening,
something made but not manufactured.
Dylan’s
power (as distinct from his talent) is, like any star‘s,
invested in him by his audience, who have responded not only to his
songwriting but to his exceedingly cool historical star-self. (It was
only residual cool, at times, or phantom cool, that tided him over the
dry spots.) His dandy clothes, his excellent florid hair, his tough
boots and famous blue eyes all factor in. And that he remains
personally elusive -- a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,
stuck inside of Mobile, tangled up in blue -- keeps him as eternally
fascinating as his most mysterious compositions. (Jewels and binoculars
hang from the head of the mule?) He’s the crossword you can‘t complete,
and can’t give up. The more determined faithful seek to forge some kind
of consistency, the way Star Trek
fans try to resolve authorial carelessness into a stable cosmology;
they strain to backward-engineer him through his records. But even when
he seems to talk straight, he comes off as an unreliable narrator --
which somehow makes him more interesting than irritating. And in spite
of the fact that he spends an enormous amount of time in public,
singing songs at least some of which spring from personal experience or
express his actual beliefs, he seems to be hardly there; a wraith, a
visitation.
And yet he‘s a colossus; his
shadow stretches across four-fifths of the last half-century -- along
with his 60th birthday, Dylan is celebrating 40 years in show business.
There are a couple of generations of pop fans already grown to whom he
would rightfully mean nothing, being of a grandfatherly age and
interested musically in even older forms and means of production; but
everyone who writes a song to express a sentiment deeper than “Tell
your Ma, tell your Pa/Our loves are gonna grow ooh-wah, ooh-wah,” or
cares about such songs, owes him a debt. In any case he’s lately been
hard to miss, winning Grammys for the 1997 Time Out of Mind, an Oscar and a
Golden Globe for “Things Have Changed” (from Wonder Boys). Rolling Stone gave the new album
its first five-star review for a new release in nine years. His songs
are turning up in commercials. People keep writing books about him. And
he‘s onstage about a third of the year, visibly having a good time and
singing like he means it, in a grumbly voice that has moved from his
nose to his chest and shows all the ravages of his age and bad habits
(vocal bad habits, I mean, of course) and keeping the performing
schedule of an indie punk band with its own van. But it’s the right
voice for the songs and the time, and Dylan‘s sense of rhythm and sound
is unparalleled.
Like Time Out of Mind, “Love
and Theft” (the quotation marks are part of the title, which is
borrowed from a book by Eric Lott on blackface minstrelsy) seems to
exist in a patchwork past, in a landscape out of Joel Chandler Harris
by way of Flannery O’Conner. I think of it also as a kind of down-home
The Waste Land, set in American cadences and stitched from bits of old
folk songs and blues, Tin Pan Alley tunes, the Bible, and other works
of literature and myth, from Virgil to F. Scott Fitzgerald, with cameos
by the real people of history -- though, unlike Eliot, Dylan leaves the
footnoting to the fans. The meanings of these juxtapositions can‘t
always be parsed, if meanings there are; but even as they slip away
they create a picture. They mean what they say, even when they don’t
say anything.
“Old, young -- age don‘t carry
weight/It doesn’t matter in the end,” Dylan sings here, but the curious
nature of permanent pop culture means that all his younger selves are
simultaneously available for review, and inevitably suggest the
irreversible flight of time‘s arrow. Yet he has achieved a point of
integration now, where all those earlier selves collaborate -- “Love and Theft” is of a piece
with Bringing It All Back Home
and John Wesley Harding
without aping them -- and somehow he does seem younger than ever.
“You’re a worn-out star” the girls all say, as he drives in the flats
in his Cadillac car, but he‘s in fighting shape, considering, and duded
up with a rakish pencil-thin mustache that looks as if it might have
actually been penciled on. (And if I read the reference right -- “I’m
staying with Aunt Sally/But, you know, she‘s not really my aunt” --
he’s also, if only for a couplet, Huck Finn, the great American boy and
free spirit.) He‘s ready to go. There’s always some new costume to try
on, some new way to sing an old song. He not busy being born is busy
dying. (Bob Dylan said that.)
© Robert Lloyd 2001
and 2011
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