by Sean Wilentz
The collection contains some studio gems that had not been previously released. One of Dylan’s quirks as he has grown older has been to leave some of his best work off of his albums, for no stated reason. In his liner notes, Larry Sloman remembers expressing shock in 1983 at learning that “Blind Willie McTell” would be dropped from the forthcoming Infidels. (“Aw Ratso, don’t get so excited,” he recalls Dylan saying.9 “It’s just an album. I’ve made thirty of them.”) Still, imagine the kind of reception Infidels would have received—and how the arc of Dylan’s career might have bent—if “Foot of Pride” as well as “Blind Willie” had been left on. “Red River Shore,” cut from Time Out of Mind and left unreleased, is, if not a masterpiece like “Blind Willie,” better than almost all of Dylan’s officially released material from the mid-1980s and the 1990s. (The legendary session keyboard player Jim Dickinson told an interviewer he thought it was the best of the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind.) “Marchin’ to the City,” also discarded, is just as good, and “Dreamin’ of You”—which, after not appearing on Time Out of Mind, fragmented and appeared piecemeal in various other songs down the road—is not too far behind.
Then there are the concert tracks on Tell Tale Signs. Dylan’s reworking, onstage, of his own compositions, as well as others’, had been legendary since the 1970s, and even today it can frustrate those fans who adore his songs but whom he asks to think about them fresh—yet who, after all these years, still don’t want to. Tell Tale Signs includes a remarkable performance of “Cocaine Blues” at the concert I was fortunate to attend at Wolf Trap in 1997. This version is neither the one made famous by the Reverend Gary Davis during the 1960s folk revival, nor Dave Van Ronk’s adaptation of Davis’s, nor Dylan’s own youthful rendering of Van Ronk’s. (Van Ronk, who performed the song beautifully umpteen times, sometimes turned his twilight growl into an ironic chuckle about the effects of hard drugs.) It is almost a wholly new song, with Dylan’s raspy plaint more desperate than the others—the desperation soaring over the then newly added band member Larry Campbell’s delicate fingerpicking. (Getting to hear several live tracks with Campbell, one of the very finest sidemen Dylan has ever hired, is one of the additional treats of Tell Tale Signs.) The album also shows Dylan working hard in the studio. Three versions of “Mississippi,” all from the Time Out of Mind sessions, run from sorrowful to worn-out to courageous. They reveal how inflection and tone can make up for a constriction of vocal range, and how changes in either can completely change the mood if the song is rich enough. They also show how Dylan approaches one of his own songs, trying to figure it out as if someone else had written it, maybe an eon ago.
But the revelation on Tell Tale Signs is the stripped-down studio version of one of the older songs, the deceptively pretty, apocalyptic spiritual summons “Ring Them Bells” from 1989, sung and played solo on the piano. Sloman remarks that Dylan’s performance of the song was so strong that for the track finally released on Oh Mercy, Lanois, the practiced soundscaper, added only a quiet guitar and organ backing. And it is true that Dylan’s mastery of phrasing and breath is fully in evidence in the version included on Oh Mercy. Yet Lanois’s little production touches made the song sound bright and full, almost like a glad tiding, whereas here the song sounds less certain and more urgent, as if the chimes of freedom and righteousness—tolling “for the blind and the deaf” and “for all of us who are left” and for the chosen few who will judge the many—may not flash in time. A superb, contained recording, it is one of the last gasps of the hopefulness that would seem to have vanished by the late 1990s, when things had changed and Dylan sang of being locked in tight and no longer caring.
Of course, by the time Tell Tale Signs appeared, there were reasons for Dylan to think that fresh signs were appearing. Without his being in any way direct about it, the smoldering but bleak and pessimistic feel of so much of Dylan’s songwriting over the previous decade inescapably reflected the times. The same held for his film Masked and Anonymous, with its Melvillean political allegory of civil war. But just maybe, beginning in 2006, he sensed history’s gears shifting again. Playing in Minneapolis on the night Barack Obama was elected president, the stubbornly reticent Dylan broke with habit and told the audience that he had been born in 1941, the year Pearl Harbor was bombed, and that he had lived in a world of darkness ever since, but that “it looks like things are gonna change now.”10 Though I understood the symbolism and the emotive force, I was more skeptical at the time, and could imagine that Dylan was being ironic or at least ambiguous. But without betraying any kind of certainty let alone commitment, he sounded sincere and even excited, as if the markings of his music might prove not a descent into final disillusionment but the prelude to new and different kinds of tales and signs.
In any event, Dylan’s surge of productivity continued with the release, at the end of April 2009, of Together Through Life—and while I was listening to the album’s third track, something hit me. The song, “My Wife’s Home Town,” is basically a clever reprise of the Muddy Waters classic “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” written by the Chicago blues great Willie Dixon, first recorded by Waters in 1954, and later recorded by, among others, Etta James and the (early) Rolling Stones. (The song also appears to have been part of the inspiration behind Dylan’s own “All I Really Want to Do,” from 1964.) The accordion part (played beautifully by David Hidalgo) drifts in and out of lines played on the original by the pianist Otis Spann and the harmonica virtuoso Little Walter. But the melody is the same, and the arrangement comes mighty close, closer than any of the borrowing on “Love and Theft” or Modern Times.* And the song’s credits correctly cite Dixon.
Willie Dixon (stand-up bass) and Muddy Waters (guitar) performing on CBC-TV’s The Blues, a “Festival” special broadcast on February 23, 1966, in Canada. (photo credit 11.8)
I wondered, on first hearing the track, whether Dylan was paying homage to Waters or Dixon or James or Mick Jagger, or maybe all of them. But what hit me was something else: how Dylan’s voice, with age, had harshened into a blues rasp vaguely reminiscent of yet another Chicago blues great, Howlin’ Wolf. And so, on an old song that Dylan had rewritten into a wicked number about an evil wife whose hometown is hell and who wields “stuff more potent than a gypsy’s curse,” strange specters appeared—shades from Chess Records sessions dating back more than half a century that suddenly materialized as Dylan, Hidalgo, and the rest of the band that Dylan assembled for Together Through Life. An album of songs about women and love (with most of the songs’ lyrics co-credited to Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead writer with whom Dylan had written before), it is also about music that Dylan had traveled with through his own life—and it contains some of that music.
The recording was in some ways very much of a piece with Dylan’s work dating back to “Love and Theft.” Sounds, melodies, country and pop-song lyrics—“the boulevard of broken dreams” became “the boulevard of broken cars”—snatches of classical poetry—Ovid showed up as he did on Modern Times, once again unnoted—got turned into something new that also sounded old. Once more, the simplest of the songs contained layers that approached allusion, but only just. In her 1974 hit “Jolene,” Dolly Parton pleads with a raving beauty, “with flaming locks of auburn hair” and “eyes of emerald green,” begging her not to steal her man. Dylan’s “Jolene” does not even attempt to match Parton’s, which is one of the great performances in country-and-western music, but it is an interesting counterpart. In Dylan’s version, a toss-off steady rocker with a nice guitar hook, Jolene’s eyes are brown and Dylan sings as the king to her queen, while he packs a Saturday night special—a plain enough sex song, but lurking in the lyrics and the music are also hints of Robert Johnson’s “32-20 Blues,” as well as Victoria Spivey’s album recorded in early 1962, Three Kings and the Queen (on which a twenty-year-old Bob Dylan, no king, played harmonica in back of Big Joe Williams).
Even when the songs tell of loss and longing, the album has a musically warm, at ti
mes almost sunny atmosphere, as if it were being performed under the shade of a tree, weekend music for dancing couples in some lazy southwestern border town. That feeling came largely from the Tex-Mex strains of Hidalgo’s squeeze box, at times paired with Dylan’s current road band regular Donnie Herron playing a mariachi trumpet. And there was a good deal of throwback here too, to Dylan’s own music as well as to that of others. Dylan had used Tex-Mex sounds effectively in his own work since at least 1965, when he added, at the last minute, Charlie McCoy’s brilliant guitar to the studio version of “Desolation Row.” At the very moment he broke with the more conventional forms of 1960s folk music, Dylan publicly acknowledged his admiration for the work of his friend the San Antonio genius Doug Sahm and Sahm’s Tex-Mex rock band with a British invasion name, the Sir Douglas Quintet.
The sound of much of Together Through Life fit well with the mythic Old West setting that (along with the Civil War and the bluesmen’s land, from Mississippi to Chicago, circa 1938 to 1955) has repeatedly sparked Dylan’s imagination: matrices of American myth. Hidalgo was also the latest in a string of master keyboard players with whom Dylan had played and recorded over the decades, including Paul Griffin, Al Kooper, Garth Hudson, and Augie Meyers, not to mention his own often overlooked piano and organ playing. And while Together Through Life bears no obvious resemblance to Blonde on Blonde, the metallic glow Dylan found for that album reappears, sometimes shining softly, sometimes shimmering in a rollicking jump.
As early press reports revealed, the album grew out of a commission to write a song (which became “Life Is Hard”) for a film directed by Olivier Dahan, My Own Love Song. There was nothing odd about that either: at Dylan’s live shows, he still shows off, perched on one of the amps, the Oscar he won for “Things Have Changed” in the film Wonder Boys (which helped make him, along with Aaron Copland, one of the few artists ever to receive both a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award). One of the album’s more infectious songs, “If You Ever Go to Houston” (its title taken from Leadbelly’s classic “Midnight Special”), carries us back for a little while to the 1870s or so, sung in the voice of a veteran of the Mexican-American War who instructs the listener on how to walk in that city (the album has a thing about keeping your hands in your pockets), with some site check-offs for other Texas cities (like Dallas, with its Magnolia Hotel, although Houston has one of these, too)—but mainly with a lush soundscape of Tony Garnier’s bass, with Mike Campbell (borrowed from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers) on a gut-stringed acoustic guitar and Hidalgo playing a repeating tune of descending note pairings.
There are no Dylan epics like “Highlands” or even “Ain’t Talkin’ ” on the album, nor too much, really, to tax the brain, but there is plenty to dance to, shake to, even laugh to. Together Through Life is above all a musical album, which may have disappointed the Bob Dylan wing of English departments throughout the nation and around the world. The album’s look drove that home. For the front cover, Dylan selected one of Bruce Davidson’s photographs of a Brooklyn gang taken in 1959, depicting a serious make-out session in the backseat of a speeding car: love and sex. But the album’s back cover is completely musical—a Josef Koudelka photograph, taken in 1968, of a band of Romanian gypsy musicians, with an accordionist and a trumpet player right in the middle.
The album included a protest song, but more humorous than accusatory, sending up the inane, omnipresent motivational-speaker cliché “It’s all good!” And politically minded fans who might have expected a Dylan song entitled “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” to pick up where Sam Cooke left off would be surprised by its reflective, later-in-the-day love lyric in which the singer announces his high-low taste in books and music, and which has a bridge that some would hear as a skeptical Dylan himself speaking, in the sobering early aftermath of Barack Obama’s election to the White House: “Dreams never did work for me, anyway / Even when they did come true.” The song also includes a lovely, poignant lifting about “the fourth part of the day”—apparently taken from Chaucer—being nearly gone.11
In 1965, the year that Dylan famously played electric at the Newport Folk Festival, the fetishists of authenticity (along with fans who just loved great American music) clung to the rediscovered black blues artists who were enjoying a last taste of celebrity, singing the songs they had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s for the Vocalion and OKeh and Bluebird labels. There was Son House (who was sixty-three years old), and Mississippi John Hurt (in his early seventies), and Mance Lipscomb (exactly seventy), as well as a younger cohort that included Willie Dixon, who was fifty, and Memphis Slim, who was forty-nine. Now the untamed young musical expeditionary of 1965 was right up there with the old guys—he turned sixty-eight shortly after Together Through Life was released—yet he was not just reinventing and performing his old songs for college kids but also turning the old into the new and then back again, with fresh myth-laden music that made you think and feel at the same time. This time out, though, maybe more than ever, he also roused you to dance and dance, and then dance some more, and then, well … then we’d just see what developed.
* “If I’m on stage, my idol—even my biggest idol when I’m on stage—the one that’s running through my head all the time, is Charlie Chaplin,” Dylan remarked in 1961. See “The Billy James Interview Fall 1961,” www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/61-fall.htm.
* In the landmark case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994), the Court ruled that the key factor in determining fair use is “whether and to what extent [the new work] is ‘transformative,’ altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message.”
* The borrowing from Jackson includes the first line of the third verse, “I’m the oldest son of a crazy man”; “Look Out Papa Don’t Tear Your Pants” includes the spoken introduction: “Yessir! My pappy’s an old man, crazy ’bout young gals. By me being the oldest son, that made me be crazy too. Now I’m gonna tell you all about my pappy getting over that fence.”
* As Ginsberg also does in the film. One of the documentary’s most moving moments comes when Ginsberg, who has been choosing his words carefully, momentarily chokes up when he recalls hearing Dylan on record for the first time in 1963. After listening to “Hard Rain,” he recalls, he wept at the recognition that another generation had arrived to pick up “earlier bohemian or Beat illumination and self-empowerment … Poetry is words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end, that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it because somebody’s realized it. Then you call it poetry later.”
* Dylan had all sorts of fun with his selections right from the start. Describing Muddy Waters as “one of the ancients by now whom all moderns prize,” he selected a number that listeners might easily associate with his own “Blowin’ in the Wind,” but that contained a verse which Dylan actually adapted later for “It Takes a Lot to Laugh (It Takes a Train to Cry)”: “Don’t the sun look lonesome / Shading down behind the trees? / Don’t the sun look lonesome / Shading down behind the trees? / But don’t your house look lonesome / When your baby’s packed to leave?”
* That said, the finest single performance of Dylan’s I heard, about this time, was a heartbreaking “Nettie Moore,” played during the summer of 2008 at an otherwise unremarkble concert at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn.
* The melody and arrangement of another song, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” resemble those of “All Your Love,” recorded by Otis Rush in 1958. My thanks to Tony Glover on this point.
CODA
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?
Christmas in the Heart, October 13, 2009
When word spread during the summer of 2009 about the contents of Bob Dylan’s second album of the year, Christmas in the Heart, there were almost audible gasps of astonishment on the Dylan fan blogs and Web sites. It mattered little that Dylan was about the only major popular American singer or musician of modern times who had as yet failed to make a Christmas album. Bing Crosby made several
, springing in part from the all-time popularity of his “White Christmas,” but the list has run the gamut from Frank Sinatra to Joan Baez, to the Ventures, to the Ronettes (as part of a compilation album, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector). Even Jewish singers, including Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, released Christmas albums. In 1934, Eddie Cantor (born Edward Israel Iskowitz) had a huge hit with a brand-new song that other major singers had turned down as too childish: “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” One of the most beloved holiday standards, “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” was cowritten by the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants whose name, before they changed it, was Torma—Mel Tormé.
One of my favorites of all the Christmas records—recorded by Elvis Presley, entitled simply Elvis’ Christmas Album, and released in 1957—includes, on one side, old standbys such as “White Christmas” and Gene Autry’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” and new rockers such as “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” and, on the other, carols and black gospel songs. The latter include Presley and his backup singers, the Jordanaires, performing Thomas A. Dorsey’s “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (for Me),” a performance that, for purely spiritual reasons, moves me more with each passing year. But no matter how many singers had come before, to fans who still remembered Dylan as the rebellious voice of the counterculture, or even those who had heard the older, sophisticated re-assembler of American music and literature, the thought of him recording anything as sentimental as a Christmas album seemed odd. Was Dylan up to his old tricks, changing his style dramatically just when listeners and critics thought they had him pegged? Was it all just a high-spirited spoof?
