Sorry about the lack of blog entries in recent months. Having been ill throughout the first half of the year, I've had to work hard to catch up with my contract. I do intend to return to the second part of my albums Dylan should perform in their entirety theme, but, being as it's not only a new year, but a new decade, here's my contribution to the list mountain.
The Best Dylan Songs of the 00's
What a great decade this has been for new Dylan songs! Here is my list of the best 10 of them.
1. Cross the Green Mountain
The movie 'Gods and Generals,' a civil war epic, was mostly panned by the critics, but Dylan lavished on it one of his greatest songs. It opens with a dream-vision -- or is it a nightmare?
I cross the green mountain, I sit by the stream Heaven blazing in my head, I dreamt a monstrous dream Something came up out of the sea And swept through the land of the rich and the free
That third line is terrific -- one thinks of the monsters of classical mythology that come out of the sea to devour their prey, such as the Zeus-sent creature who destroyed Hippolytus or the serpents that emerge from the sea to strangle Laocoon and his sons after the priest of Poseidon strikes the Trojan horse.
But also, as the Canadian poet and writer on Dylan Stephen Scobie suggested to me in an email, post-9/11 "something came up out of the sea" is bound to suggest the death that dropped out of the air on that dark day. It would be typical of Dylan to transfer the threat from the sky to the sea.
The song, appropriately for a civil war epic, incorporates memories of Whitman as well as the "poet laureate of the Confederacy," Henry Timrod, to whom Dylan later nods more than once on Modern Times.
On and on the song rolls, stately, magnificent, and epic (that word again), and you don't want it ever to end.
2. Highwater (for Charley Patton)
The most striking track of an album released on 9/11, it seems horrible prophetic of the events of that day, and the science-hating, religious primitivism that dominated in both America and the Muslim world in the first decade of the 21st century. Even the fate of New Orleans seems, in retrospect, to have been foreshadowed in this dark masterpiece (which nevertheless finds time for a flash of humour: "I got a cravin' love for blazing speed/Got a hopped up Mustang Ford/Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard."
Apart from anything else, it's a great blues-based rocker, one of the highlights of stage performances of this decade, especially with the first Charlie Sexton band.
3. Summer Days
A lot of Dylan fans moaned when this exciting jump blues began the inevitable closer of every Dylan show for the best part of the decade. Well, I for one can't get enough of this joyful song that rages against the dying of the light. "Summer days and summer nights are gone/I know somewhere where something's still going on," Bob sings, determined to still have a ball even though he acknowledges his best days might be behind him.
Everybody get ready - lift up your glasses and sing Everybody get ready to lift up your glasses and sing Well, I'm standin' on the table, I'm proposing a toast to the King
Well I'm drivin' in the flats in a Cadillac car The girls all say, "You're a worn out star" My pockets are loaded and I'm spending every dime How can you say you love someone else when you know it's me all the time?
4. Forgetful Heart
This, by contrast, is one of the most haunting and bleak songs Bob has ever written. It's live debut in Milwaukee on the first of July 2009 was Bob's best performance of the year. Like several of the songs on Together Through Life, it seems slight at first, but leaves a deep impression:
All night long I lay awake and listen to the sound of pain The door has closed forever more If, indeed, there ever was a door
A delicate, haunting gem of a song that Bob performed several times over the summer and fall, alone, center stage, with just mouth harp.
5. Floater (Too Much To Ask)
An extraordinary portrait of a stuck-in-his-ways misanthrope, a rum old boy living in isolation somewhere in a beautifully evoked deep south. The element of alienation and disenchantment with the present is offset by memories of a deeply cherished childhood:
My grandfather was a duck trapper He could do it with just dragnets and ropes My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas Eves I left all my dreams and hopes Buried under tobacco leaves
As well as its element of old-geezerish misanthropy, however, the song has its element of reconcilation between the generations:
The old men 'round here, sometimes they get On bad terms with the younger men But old, young, age don't carry weight It doesn't matter in the end
And there is the marvellous touch of humour in evoking the awkwardness of modern adolescent lovers and contrasting them with Shakespeare's classic doomed lovers:
Romeo, he said to Juliet, "You got a poor complexion. It doesn't give your appearance a very youthful touch!" Juliet said back to Romeo, "Why don't you just shove off If it bothers you so much."
This is one of the most extraordinary and original Dylan songs, an extraordinary mixture of highly evocative lyricism and colloquial language, mixed with a smidgen of schoolboy humour. It offers something new on each listen.
6. Po' Boy
An extraordinary song, like so many of those on 'Love and Theft', evocative of the deep south. Here Dylan seems to be singing in the person of a black man ("Boy" is of course racially derogative rather than an indication of age) in the pre-war south, "dodgin' them Georgia laws" evoking the whole world of Jim Crow and its petty obstructions. This song more than any other makes us think of the book by Eric Lott from which Bob took the title of his album: Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, an examination of the whole of blackface minstrelsy in American cultural life. The blackface minstrel, in Lott's interpretation, represents not just cultural appropriation ("theft"), but also homage to "what is stolen ("love"). Rock 'n' roll is itself a manifestation of both these aspects of blackface minstrelsy.
But Dylan's song is even more suffused with schoolboy humour than Floater, with nonsequiturs (I say, "How much you want for that?" I go into the store/Man says, "Three dollars." "All right," I say, "Will you take four?"), an outrageous pun ("Call down to room service, says "Send up a room"), and a knock-knock joke. (Knockin' on the door, I said, "Who's it, where you from?"/Man said, "Freddie." I said, "Freddie who?"/He said, "Freddie or not, here I come!"). And there is another humorous reference to Shakespearean characters.
This "po' boy" has the police on his back, he's washing dishes and feeding swine, he's branded by the claws of time and love, he's "ridin' first class trains" (not legally, one assumes), "tryin' hard not to fall between the cars." The amount of detail in this song, as it is in "Floater," is extraordinary. The cultural vitality, but also the social inequality and racism of the south is evoked. The song is scored for banjo and acoustic guitar, with lounge-style jazz chords, and sung with a soft-shoe charm.
7. Workingman Blues #2
Another extraordinary hotchpotch, this song more than any other on Modern Times evokes the world of Charlie Chaplin's last silent picture.
8. Nettie Mooore
An extraordinary song, with a beautiful, wistful melody and very unusual, off-kilter drumbeat.
9. This Dream of You
For some years now, Bob has been trying to write a classic Tin Pan Alley-type song, and here he finally succeeds. Like several of the songs on Together Through Life, this has an agreeable Tex-Mex flavour.
10. Things Have Changed
The song Bob contributed to the movie "Wonder Boys" and which won him an Academy Award for best movie song. In retrospect, it is the bridge between Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. It shares the formers disillusion and cynicism, but looks forward to the latter's lighter tone. "I used to care, but things have changed," the refrain goes. But thankfully Bob has shown many times this decade, not least on "Love and Theft," which ranks with his great masterpieces, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Blood on the Tracks, and and Desire.
Honorary mentions; any one of the following could have made the list: Mississippi (but I decided it was really a Time Out of Mind, i.e. nineties song), Lonesome Day Blues, Cry A While, Ain't Talkin', Moonlight, Life Is Hard (just pipped by This Dream of You), Tell Ol' Bill.
In recent years several artists have been giving shows that consist mostly of a single album, played in its entirety. Van Morrison not so long ago played Astral Weeks live to critical acclaim, even releasing the result as a cd Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl and a DVD (exclusive to Amazon: see inset).
A few years ago Elvis Costello gave a performance of his first and most widely loved album, My Aim Is True, even reuniting with the original musicians.
And in 2002 David Bowie played the whole of Low in one set and then came back to perform his then latest album Heathen in a second set.
Rufus Wainwright even performed the whole of Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall.
Anyway, you get the idea.I started off by thinking that Bob would never do something like this, then I suddenly realized, he already has -- exactly 30 years ago this month he started the first of two tours on which he performed the whole of Slow Train Coming and the then-unreleased Saved in their entirety (barring 'Satisfied Mind' off the latter, which can be regarded as a sort of 'bonus track.' Also, 'Are You Ready?' only emerged as very a late addition to the second tour, and was then played throughout the third gospel tour, when Bob dropped some songs and added others, some of which remain unreleased to this day).
So once again, Bob was way ahead of the pack. Except of course, the context was different. One album was Bob's latest release and the other would be his next album, and both were informed by his religious belief, giving him a burning desire to perform them to audiences. I cannot see Bob doing a show in which he rattled off the whole of Highway 61 Revisited and then came out and did all of Blood on the Tracks. And even if he did, of course, the songs would be unrecognizable from the versions on the original albums, and the musicians would be different (even if all the original ones were still alive, I can't see him choosing to play with the same people again). And of course, whereas someone like Van Morrison sounds much the same as he did in 1970, Bob's voice has gone through umpteen changes.
So this blog is purely for fun. Tell me which two albums you would pick to be played in their entirety for your fantasy, one-off Dylan live show. Also, who would you like to play with him for these revisited versions (stick to living musicians, please, just to make it a little more plausible)?
I'll go first. These aren't necessarily my favourite albums, I just think that they would make for a fantastic show.
First off, Bob should do the whole of Freewheelin'. Firstly, that will give us a few live debuts -- I don't believe that he's ever performed "Bob Dylan's Blues", "Down the Highway", or "I Shall Be Free" live at all, while there is just one circulating live performance of "Oxford Town" and "Corrina, Corrina" and two of "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" (ignoring home recordings). "Bob Dylan's Dream" hasn't been heard since 1991, and "Talkin' World War III Blues" since 1965.
And this half of the show should at least predominantly solo, because we haven't seen that for a while. Maybe he could be joined by some backing musicians on a couple of songs -- maybe we could even finally get to hear what the rocked up "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" might have sounded like (backing musicians are said to be on this track on the Freewheelin' liner notes! No such version has ever surfaced. There is even a rumored "Dixieland" take!) And while they were out there, they could perhaps play on the live debut of Mixed-Up Confusion... The only other "outtake" from the Freewheelin' album I would include in the show would be the all-time great love song Tomorrow Is A Long Time (strictly speaking, it was not recorded in the Freewheelin' sessions at all, but was demoed in between sessions). But hey, if he wants to debut Rocks and Gravel while he's out there, who am I to argue with Bob?
I even have my running order for this one-off live show (to be performed at a suitable small venue within a 20 mile radius of my house), which departs from the original sequence.
I Shall Be Free (starting where he left off in 1963) -- Bob on guitar. Gets Bob and us relaxed and warmed up. New lyrics with updated references, including to Alicia Keyes and Scarlett Johannson) Masters of War (Bob on guitar). Oxford Town (Bob on guitar) -- end of first 'protest' sectoin Down the Highway (Bob on guitar & harmonica) Bob Dylan's Blues (Bob on guitar & harmonica Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance (Bob on guitar) -- concludes blues section. Talkin' World War III Blues (Bob on guitar) -- Bob brings house down with new final line: "Barack Obama said that! At least I think that's what he said!) Girl of the North Country (Bob on guitar and harmonica) Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Bob on guitar, Donnie Heron on violin) [End of the Echo-Suze section]
Bobtalk: "Ladies and gentlemen! I want to introduce my current band! That was Donnie Herron you just heard on violin. On lead guitar, Charlie Sexton! On bass, Tony Garnier! On the drums, the best drummer we could find tonight, George Recile! And the other guy who you can never actually hear but who follows me around, Stu Kimball!)
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Bob on keyboards, the rest as above, except Donnie on pedal steel rather than violin).
Bobtalk: "This next song was my first single. Hands up if you were the guy who bought it."
Mixed-Up Confusion (musicians as above) Rocks and Gravel (musicians as above) -- OPTIONAL Corrina, Corrina (musicians as above except Charlie and Bob on acoustic guitars, no drums)
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (Bob on guitar).
Bobtalk: "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! That song was called "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", and it certainly is. Goodnight!"
Long, sustained applause.
Encore:
Blowin' in the Wind (Bob on guitar and harmonica, Joan Baez on backing vocals -- just kiddin'!)
Curtain falls on first part of show, leaving the audience stunned and amazed, especially a certain raggedclown...
Which album will Bob play when he comes back for the second half of the show? Will it be Christmas From the Heart? Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, do let me have your own suggestions for albums* Bob should play in their entirety live, with as much detail as possible. Let your fantasies run wild!
*I was thinking of his own studio albums, but if you think he should sing the whole of Sinatra in the Sands or Kate Bush's A Kick Inside, who am I to stop you? It's your fantasy.
Two boxes of deep-filled mince pies -- check! Frozen turkey dinner -- check! Bottle of 'champagne' -- i.e. cheap sparkling plonk -- check! Figgy pudding -- check! One cracker to pull with oneself (yes, I am sad) -- check! One copy of Bob Dylan's new hot waxing Christmas in the Heart -- check!
I'm all set for my best Christmas ever -- i.e. one without relatives.
Yes, just when you thought there was no other major cultural impact for His Bobness to have, having turned rock music from teenage pap into an art form, having made country cool, having brought poetry to the juke box, having messed with religion and women's knickers, having sung a knock-knock joke, and having written a song with Michael Bolton done lots of other cool things, the Mighty Bob has decreed that Christmas shall henceforth be celebrated in October!
The younger generation were quick to heed the call -- behold this similarly entitled offering, released the same day (today):
am reliably informed that this wee leprechaun is the most recent winner of American Idol, cunningly disguised as a diminutive fawn. I know whose voice I prefer...
I think this that Christmas in the Heart is the greatest album ever released on October 13th 2009 (sorry, David Achoochoo fans). And just what the world needs in the middle of a depression -- turning the clock back to good times and partying like it's 1955! It's cheesy, it's cheery, it's addictive and probably very bad for you -- just like Christmas itself in fact!
Well, it may be unfair to assume that Bob was tight ("loaded") when he recorded these new tracks, but they certainly sound like he cooked them up and knocked them out in the studio without much thought or deliberation. Beyond Here Lies Nothing might as well be entitled "Here Lies Nothing," and for all its (highly derivative) musical charm, I Feel A Change Coming On isn't even as interesting lyrically as the slightly underrated Under Your Spell from one of Bob's least successful albums. The refrain is quite catchy, but most of the rest of the lyrics are trite. Also, I'm a bit fed up with Bob telling us who he's listening to or reading all the time. This is a lazy way of filling in a couple of lines. Still, if that's what he likes, here's a suggestion for his next album:
I'm listening to Britney Spears I almost forgot the taste of fears
The second line is a near quotation from Macbeth (V.v) , which gives you the impression that something clever is being said, a bit like "I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce/Some people say I've got the blood of the land in my voice," but you see how easy it is? I could write dozens of couplets like this, and I'm sure you could too, but it's a cheap trick.
Also, the refrain seems a bit exploitative, tapping into the expectations generated by Obama's "change we can believe in" slogan, while refraining from commenting on those expectations. Again the comparison is with a Knocked Out Loaded song, one of Dylan's very worse, the execrable Got My Mind Made Up:
Well I'm going off to Libya There's guy I gotta see He's been living there three years now In an oil refinery
Lines so bad, and at the same time, so deliberately evocative of an interest he has no intention of satisfying, and therefore exploitative, that I have always taken the easy way out and blamed poor Tom Petty for them!
Musically,I Feel A Change Comin' On is somewhat reminiscent of Handy Dandy, a much better song.
For the benefit of anyone who has problems with streaming audio files, I include below mp3s of these two pre-release songs. If you do download them, please delete them if you don't like them or if you do not buy Together Through Life when it's released.
Also, if you have time and inclination, please click on some of the Google links!
I was hoping to finish my piece on 'Joey' and post it here (see previous blog), but I am still unwell and can't spend too long on line these days. Thanks for the get well messages, I will respond to every one of them individually when I'm fully recovered.
One of the few things I've been able to do since getting out of hospital is sit up in bed and read. Over the past six weeks I've read lots of Dryden, Pope, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Arnold, Plath and much more besides. I also ordered a new copy of my Riverside Chaucer, a splendid work of American scholarship that makes it easy to read Chaucer in the original almost as quickly as in a modernized version (and with a good deal more satisfaction). My old paperback version was falling to bits, so I got a lovely hardback one from Amazon at a very reasonable price. This was before I heard about Dylan supposedly quoting Chaucer in a modern translation on his new album, Together Through Life (link to the Deluxe Edition). However, it wasn't long before I stumbled across an earlier borrowing from England's greatest comic writer (bar Shakespeare) in The Franklyn's Tale:
Aurelius, with blisful herte anoon, Answerde thus: "Fy on a thousand pound! This wyde world, which that men seye is round
Bob quotes the italicised line in Ain't Talkin', of course. (Incidentally, it was well known in the Middle Ages that the earth was round -- the myth that before Christopher Columbus's voyage people believed that the earth was flat entered the popular imagination in the 19th century thanks to Washington Irving's novel about the explorer. Chaucer's tale is set in ancient Britanny and the line adds a touch of realism). That indefatibable sleuth Scott Warmuth has discovered that Bob also lifts another line for the Tell Tale Signs outtake of the same song from The Reeve's Tale.
This (and no doubt the quotations on the new album) are of a piece with Bob's Modern Times quotations: in other words, he is not "intertextualizing" at all, i.e. there appears to be no attempt at an ironic counterpoint or other creative contact with the original. He doesn't expect the listener to make a connection with Chaucer, the Franklyn, or his Tale. He has simply filched the line because it sounds nice. To quote something I wrote about this subject some weeks ago:
When Virgil quotes or adapts lines from the earlier Roman poet Ennius or from Homer, he actually wanted to send his audience to the original text, or rather, he assumes that the original text is familiar to his readers, and part of the pleasure is the mutual act of piety (it is more than just an intellectual tip of the hat) of the contemporary poet and his audience to the older master.
In 18th century literature, there is not only the assumption of a common store of classic learning that the poet shares with his audience, but also, especially in the works of Pope, an identification between the modern and ancient poet, both on a personal and a sociocultural level. Pope's garden retreat in Twickenham becomes Horace's Sabine farm, Johnson's London becomes Juvenal's Rome. It's a two-way exchange: you actually read Horace differently after reading Pope, and Juvenal differently after reading Johnson.
Nor does Dylan's use of cultural reference on Modern Times resemble that of T.S. Eliot, who echoes the lines of so many past texts (not just poets and other writers, but songs and snippets of conversation) to represent them as shards of a decaying culture ("these fragments I have shored against my ruin") in The Wasteland. That is at least somewhat akin to what Dylan is doing, on a much more accessible scale, in Desolation Row. Rather than lifting quotations wholesale like Eliot, he refers by name to well-known fictional characters (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ophelia) and drops them into a completely new, usual ironic contexts. And he adds adds to this mosaic sly allusions to the work of Kafka and Eliot himself (as well as name-checking him), also bringing in a sinister flavour of the American South into these mostly European references with "postcards of the hanging". It's a skilful performance, an artistic tour de force. And Dylan does this again to some extent on "Love and Theft" with his amusing use of the names of Romeo and Juliet and Don Pasquale (from the world of opera), dropping them into modern, ironic contexts (the aged Don Pasquale -- in Donizetti's opera the archetypal old man opposing the happiness of the young lovers -- paying a "2am booty call" is priceless!)
But his use of quotation in Modern Times is different. He doesn't expect his listeners to make a connection to Ovid (if anyone reads Ovid, it's usually the Ars Amatoria -- "the art of love" is actually name-checked by Bob -- or the Metamorphoses, probably the most influential book on English literature after the Bible; not Ovid's self-pitying diatribes from exile on the Black Sea coast). Nor is he identifying himself with Ovid in exile or making a critique of modern culture by collecting its detritus. He's just using some lines he found in one of Ovid's modern translators to eke out his verses. There is no kind of cultural interchange between Dylan and Ovid or his translator at all. (The same can be said of Bob's use of Timrod on the same album, although his use of the Civil War poet in Cross the Green Mountain does seem more apposite). No one would ever suggest that Virgil borrowed from Homer and Ennius because he wasn't able to think up lines of his own, but that does seem to be the case, sadly, with Dylan's borrowings from Ovid on Modern Times.
(Oh, and the routine practice of Shakespeare and his contemporaries of borrowing plots from older literature doesn't really belong in this argument. The nearest equivalent would be something like Ben Jonson lifting whole passages of Tacitus verbatim for dialogue in Sejanus. But Jonson had a definite purpose for this near-plagiarism, whereas Dylan has no apparent reason or need to lift from Ovid.)
After the Franklyn's Tale I read the Nun's Priest's Tale, and while I didn't find any Dylan link (maybe there will be one on the new album), I have to say that this is one of the most delightful of all the tales, and if Dylan read it in his modernized version (link to David Wright's translation for Oxford World Classics, which appears to be the edition Bob is using), he would no doubt have appreciated this "animal song"! Perhaps his attitude to his sources can be summed up in a line from this tale: "Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille."
BOB DYLAN'S BIG FREEZE - BBC Radio 2, November 25th 2008Bob's Big FreezeNovember 25th 2008BBC Radio 2, 10.30-11.30pm
From The Times:
Radio ChoiceBob's Big FreezeChris CamplingBob Harris tells the fascinating story of a significant but largely unknown chapter in the life of that living god, Bob Dylan. In 1962 the newly famous Bobster came to Britain to appear in a BBC TV play called Madhouse On Castle Street. While he was here he stayed with that eminent British folkie, Martin Carthy, who opened Dylan's ears to a whole new way of making music (Don't Think Twice It's Alright, and Bob Dylan's Dream were heavily influenced by his exposure to traditional English folk music). He also had the unequalled joy of living through the famously bitter winter of 1962-63, when Carthy was reduced to chopping up a piano for firewood.
This BBC radio documentary about Bob Dylan's first visit to the United Kingdom in the freezing winter of 1962/3 was OK, but could have been better, especially as this ground has been trod before and fairly recently, also by the BBC (Dylan in the Madhouse, 2005). It was interesting to hear a few different voices from the early 60s British folk scene, although of course Carthy and Davenport were trotted out again (not that I'm complaining, I love Martin in particular).
I also think it could have been a little less sloppy. For instance, when Bob Harris asks "Who knows what a big influence the U.K. folk scene had on Dylan at this time?" (or words to that effect), the song playing behind him is A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, which was written a couple of months before Bob set foot in England. It was left to Carthy to make the point that Dylan was already familiar with English, Scottish, and Irish folk music before he arrived in England. Hard Rain, for instance, is based partly on the Child Ballad, "Lord Randall." However, it was fascinating to hear in this programme that Bob may have also been influenced by another source (I shall elaborate later in an edit to this post). This was one of the few genuinely new (to me, at any rate) pieces of information in Dylan's Big Freeze.
It was also implied that the protest element in Bob's music came from the UK folk scene (especially Scottish folk song, which Davenport told him was all political). Carthy also claims that the anthemic quality of some of the songs Dylan wrote in the next couple of years came from his exposure to the UK scene.
But Bob was already writing political songs -- Death of Emmett Till, Let Me Die in My Footsteps, and Talking John Birch Society Paranoid Blues, for example. The important person here, apart from Bob himself, was his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, who inspired his interest in politics. Plus there is a protest element in some blues (Big Bill Broonzy, for instance, whose "When Will I Get To Be Called A Man?" may have given Bob the idea for one verse of Blowin'). And for anthemic material, Bob could turn to negro spirituals (as he did for Blowin' in the Wind, which was inspired by No More Auction Block, which he probably learned from Odetta). Plus, of course, Bob couldn't help being influenced by the Civil Rights movement in America itself at the time. All of this was surely more influential on Bob's political material than Carthy or Davenport. And that's without even mentioning Woody Guthrie!
It is true, though, that on his return to the States he withdrew the first version of Freewheelin' and replaced four of the songs with what he called "fingerpointing songs", which was probably the result of his British visit. Otherwise the record would probably have been more blues- oriented (its original title was Bob Dylan's Blues). But it already contained Blowin' in the Wind (recorded in July, written months earlier) and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (recorded in December at what was supposed at the time to have been the final session for the album).
There is so much that Bob was absorbing at this time (including Brecht, which is a major influence on The Times, They Are A-Changin'). That's why he's so fascinating, and why programmes like this one, which only focus on one element, miss the point. The first part of Martin Scorsese's brilliant No Direction Home is the best documentary of Bob's early period precisely because it shows what a sponge he was, soaking up a wide range of influences incredibly quickly and using them to produce something new.
Incidentally, it is ironic that Bob left Minnesota because (as he tells us in his interview in No Direction Home) it was "too cold to be different", only to arrive in New York in the middle of "the coldest winter in 17 years." Then when he went to England for the first time, it was our coldest winter since the 18th century!
For those who missed the transmission, I have provided an mp3 below. If you download it, by way of thanks you might like to click on some of the Google Ads, which will help me stay on line. Bob Dylan's Big Freeze
1. Two Little Boys. The children's classic that has a strange effect on grown men (and on a certain evil ex-prime minister). The real greatest single ever made!
2. Didgeridoo vs. harmonica -- I mean, which is cooler?
Well, ok, but which is more phallic?
3. Bob can't play the wobble board either.
4. His Rolfness has been backed by all four Beatles on a remake of 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down' sport -- Bob has only ever sung with George and Ringo, separately, and has never sung about kangaroos.
One thing I neglected to mention in my previous blog entry about Modern Times is that its worldwide official release day was also the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in Lousiana. Meanwhile, President Bush strummed a guitar [right] in California while New Orleans drowned, a lasting symbol of his presidency.
Perhaps the release date of Modern Times was a coincidence; but on the other hand, it does feature a song entitled The Levee's Gonna Break. This is the album's most transparent "borrowing", the song clearly deriving from When the Levee Breaks by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, which was about the Mississippi Flood of 1927, a calamity that inspired several blues songs. (Incidentally, Memphis Minnie's shout-out to Ma Rainey is the model for Dylan's name-dropping of Alicia Keys in Thunder on the Mountain; but Bob was sampling Memphis Minnie as far back as Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, as the outtake of that song released on Bootleg Series 7: No Direction Home shows.) A youtube user has made a very appropriate video to the Kansas Joe/Memphis Minnie version.
The most famous version of the song is the one by Led Zeppelin on their 1971 album Led Zeppelin IV. Dylan's new version is a curate's egg; it quotes some lines directly from the original, and adds some of his own that might refer to either the 1927 or the 2005 disaster:
Everybody saying this is a day only the Lord could make
Some people on the road carrying everything that they own
But other lines are unrelated and could be sampled from a dozen blues songs or improvised randomly in a way reminiscent of 10,000 Men on Under the Red Sky. One line seems to allude sarcastically to the plight of the proletariat (in the manner of Joe Hill's "Pie in the Sky When You Die"), thus harking back to Workingman's Blues #2:
Few more years of hard work, then there'll be a 1,000 years of happiness
But the previous lines incongruously refer to Carl Perkin's rockabilly classic "Put Your Cat Clothes On", cat clothes of course being what hepcats (guys) and kittens (chicks) wear; the juxtaposition with the more formal-sounding "evening dress" is amusing.
Here's a fine live version of Dylan's version of the song, from Chatillon, Italy 18th June this year: It's noticeable how much stronger the song has become in live performance this year.
How typical that Dylan's new title for the song should use his own favourite tense, the immediate future ("gonna"), which he uses so much (particularly in the Basement Tapes era) that it might well be called the Bob Dylan tense.
An early song that uses this tense is A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. On his visit to the city in 2003, Bob Dylan performed an inspired version of this anthemic song, almost as though he knew what was in store for the city (so it seems with hindsight, which can make a prophecy out of the slightest coincidence). Here is that performance.
They're trying to wash us away
A more recent song about the 1927 flood became suddenly topical in 2005 because of the inevitable parallels between President Coolidge's racist indifference to the plight of Lousiana flood victims and the criminal negligence of the Bush administration. The original version of Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927 is on his 1974 album Good Old Boys, perhaps Newman's masterpiece and an essential album in anybody's record collection. Here is Randy singing it at a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Katrina:
Incidentally, I am relieved, if not surprised, that Randy sticks to his original lyrics and uses the phrase "this poor crackers land." The contemptuous term "crackers" is similar to the more recent "poor white trash", and nails Coolidge's attitude to the flood victims exactly. Other versions of the song, such as Aaron Neville's, for reasons of misguided political correctness substitute a more neutral term ("farmers") that softens the original song's condemnation of Coolidge.
They say prayer has the power to help (Ain't Talkin')
As I write, people are being evacuated from New Orleans in preparation for the landfall of Hurricane Gustav, expected in the early hours of Monday morning. It is sincerely to be hoped that the city rides out this new storm and the levees hold firm this time. Of all the cities in America, New Orleans is the one I'd most like to visit, because of the richness of its musical heritage, the fame of its cuisine, and the celebrated conviviality of its people. Alas, I do not share Dylan's belief in the power of prayer, but my thoughts are with NOLA right now. If I were to frame a prayer, it might be like Lear's in the storm:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them And show the heavens more just.
Bob Dylan's 32nd studio album was released 29th August, 2006. It was greeted with almost universal critical praise, but how does it hold up two years later? And how have the individual songs fared in live performance?
Modern Times was released at the high point of a tide of critical praise that had been rising ever since Bob's brush with death in 1997 reminded critics, many of whom had been bashing Dylan's work since as far back as the release of Renaldo & Clara, that Dylan would not be always there for them to take for granted, and that we ought to celebrate his achievements while we still have him. With the subsequent release of the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind there began a period in which Dylan's critical stock rose so high that nowadays he is in receipt of praise that is almost as undiscriminating as the critical brickbats levelled at him in the eighties and early nineties. One of the few dissenting voices in the general chorus of praise for Modern Times, Alex Petridis in The Guardian, wrote waspishly: "It's hard to hear the music of Modern Times over the inevitable standing ovation and the thuds of middle-aged critics swooning in awe."
Two years later it is even more apparent that Petridis has a point. A solid achievement, Modern Times must be counted a relative disappointment compared to its illustrious predecessor "Love and Theft", Dylan's finest album since Blood on the Tracks and Desire in the mid-seventies. The quality that "Love and Theft" had in abundance was Dionysian energy: so welcome after the ennui and existential angst that had marked all Dylan's work since Infidels. Indeed, this ennervating ennui really begins with Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight on the album just mentioned:
I wish I'd been a doctor Maybe I'd have save some lives that have been lost Maybe I'd have done some good in the world 'Stead of burning every bridge I've crossed.
Fine lines, undoubtedly, but a Dylan who looks back, and especially one who looks back with such despair and disappointment, is an unrecognizable shell of the energetic, questing, Dionysian figure of his best work. By contrast on Blood on the Tracks the singer plumbs the depths of despair, but drags from it the Lear-like rage of Idiot Wind and with Buckets of Rain, learns Lear's lesson of Stoic patience also.
This existential ennui came in Dylan's late middle age at the end of a period of great creative achievement from 1974 through 1983, and from there on becomes the dominant note of his work; think of songs like When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky and Dark Eyes on Empire Burlesque and What Good Am I? , What Is It You Wanted?, and Shooting Star on Oh Mercy, in which Bob basically repeats the same mantra over and over: he knows no answers, he has no hope, he lives companionless in a world apart where "life and death are memorized." All these negative feelings reach their peak of artistic expression on Time Out of Mind, which contains what may be the most negative, nihilist line in his entire output:
Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind She put down in writing what was in her mind I just don't see why I should even care It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
When I first heard the line I've marked in bold, I found it so upsetting and depressing that it took me a long time to appreciate the real artistic achievement of Time Out of Mind, which is to state in the starkest form yet the existential ennui that had been overpowering Dylan's work since the mid-eighties. In that sense, it performs the same function as did Watching the River Flow, which faced up to the loss of his muse in the midst of his domestic content with its disarming opening line: "What's the matter with me? I don't have much to say." A Dylan who doesn't care, who is indifferent to love and desire, and who relies on negativity to pull him through is not the Dylan who once declared "this music that I’ve always played is a healing kind of music" and who wrote Desire... never fearful Finally faithful It will guide me well across all bridges inside all tunnels never fallin’.
A spiritual sickness hangs over Time Out of Mind from its opening lines, and it is only reinforced by the album's grim focus on physical decay: scars that won't heal, flesh falling off the singer's face, every nerve so vacant and numb. When he sings "But my heart just won't give in", you get the sense that he only wishes it would. Highlands, which does have its moments of humour and relief, nevertheless leaves us with a portrait of the singer as an old man shuffling along the street, talking to himself, and envying the younger people from whose unselfconscious joys and laughter he is forever banished:
I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes All the young men with their young women looking so good Well, I'd trade places with any of them In a minute, if I could
So in the 14 years since Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight, Dylan has gone precisely nowhere: still wishing he were living someone else's life, looking back with regret and despair.
The achievement of Time Out of Mind, as heretofore stated, is to state these negative feelings in unpredecentedly stark terms. But the album marks a dead end: he cannot go forward artistically by simply restating over and over these feelings of existential isolation, of negativity and regret.
That is why "Love and Theft" was such a spectacular achievement. It has an energy and vitality not heard in any Dylan song probably since Jokerman and the brilliant, underrated Tell Me in the Infidels sessions. Gone is the companionless, misanthropic singer of Dark Eyes, Not Dark Yet, and Highlands; the singer on this album shows himself still receptive to feelings of love, friendship, and gratitude:
Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me
(Of course, these lines are from Mississippi, which was written for the Time Out of Mind album; and that album's atmosphere of bleak misanthropy and spiritual ennui would have been considerably relieved by that song's inclusion, as Dylan intended. Unfortunately, he and producer Daniel Lanois could not see eye to eye on the song's production, and so the song was dropped from the album. The original recording of Mississippi is to appear on the forthcoming Bootleg Series collection of outtakes, Tell Tale Signs.)
Best of all, perhaps, is the brilliant jump blues Summer Days, a song that could not have appeared on Time Out of Mind. In contrast to the despairing resignation of Not Dark Yet, which dolefully accepted that "it's not dark yet, but it's getting there", the singer of Summer Days reminds us of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night":
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
But rather than raging against the dying of the light, the singer of Summer Daysdances against it, leaping on the table to propose a toast to the King, and declaring that though summer days and nights are gone, that doesn't mean that there is no more fun to be had. The Dionysian energy of this singer is more like the Dylan we know of old, one busy being born rather than busy dying.
The energy, high spirits, and perhaps most welcome of all, the humour of "Love and Theft" made it Dylan's finest album for over 20 years. It sparkles with wit, and contains more quotable lines than any album since Street-Legal. It was perhaps too much to hope that Modern Times could equal this standard. But refreshingly, there is no relapse into the doldrums of most of Dylan's post-Infidels output. Most welcome is the extension of Dylan's musical palate beyond his usual reliance on blues and ballad forms, although there are some disappointingly generic blues shuffles on this album also (a couple of which border on musical plagiarism). Not since the underrated Shot of Love has Dylan dipped so much into the rich waters of American popular music. A particular source is pre-rock pop of the twenties to the fifties. Bing Crosby is a particularly strong influence; "When the Deal Goes Down" is musically a chord-by-chord recreation of Bing's "Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day" and "Beyond the Horizon" lifts the tune of "Red Sails in the Sunset." Moreover, Bing's version of "Brother, Can you Spare A Dime?" (played by Bob on the Theme Time Radio Hour show "Rich Man, Poor Man") hangs over Workingman Blues #2. How much love and how much theft lies in all these borrowings has been furiously debated.
One of the most pleasing aspects of "Love and Theft" was its cheerful sexuality, as in the artful suggestion of waning potency in Summer Days: My dogs are barking, there must be someone around My dogs are barking, there must be someone around I got my hammer ringin', pretty baby, but the nails ain't goin' down
or this saucy invitation in High Water (for Charley Patton):
Got a cravin' love for blazing speed Got a hopped up Mustang Ford Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard
And best of all, this allusive third-person reference:
Last night 'cross the alley there was a pounding on the walls It must have been Don Pasquale makin' a two a.m. booty call
Don Pasquale is the eponymous character in Donizetti's opera buffa, based on the commedia dell'arte archetype of the vain and foolish old man who tries to thwart the young heroine's love for the hero by marrying her himself. With a touch of comic genius Dylan has this stock character paying a "2 a.m. booty call"; and the pounding on the walls suggests that this Don Pasquale is no impotent figure of fun, but a virile figure capable of satisfying his younger lover.
By contrast, the sexuality on Modern Times comes over as idle boasting or even slightly creepy, as in the shout out to Alicia Keys in Thunder on the Mountain and in the unpleasantly sexist line "I want some real good woman to do just what I say" in the same song, in which the singer studies Ovid's Art of Love and proclaims "here's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go." Unlike Don Pasquale who is getting on with it, paying his booty call, the singer of Thunder on the Mountain is just beating on his trumpet, or rather blowing his trombone (a rather obvious sexual metaphor).
Compare also the confident strut of Cry A While on "Love and Theft":
Well, there's preachers in the pulpits and babies in the cribs I'm longin' for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey - I'll die before I turn senile
and the same song's earlier line about feeling like a fighting rooster with the much less convincing boast in Spirit on the Water:
You think I'm over the hill You think I'm past my prime Let me see what you got We can have a whoppin' good time
That corny and dated phrase "whoppin' good time" is the antithesis of Don Pasquale's ultra-hip "booty call" and rather deflates the intended boast. Rather than as the still virile aging stud that the singer intends to present himself as, he comes over more like a paunchy dad trying to dance at his daughter's wedding reception.
Dylan does improve this verse considerably in concert by singing the first two lines as questions, with an implied "Oh yeah?!", invariably getting a reaction from the audience. And this viagra-induced boasting is at least an improvement on the indifference to desire manifest on Time Out of Mind.
Another weakness of Modern Times compared to its predecessor is its rather precious and somewhat stilted lyricism that at times borders on Victorian pastiche, especially in the parlour ballad When the Deal Goes Down and Spirit on the Water. This may be due to Dylan's falling under the spell of the Civil War poet Henry Timrod (reflected in several borrowings from the earlier poet's work). Compare the freshness of these lines from Moonlight:
The clouds are turnin' crimson The leaves fall from the limbs an' The branches cast their shadows over stone Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The boulevards of cypress trees The masquerades of birds and bees The petals, pink and white, the wind has blown Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?
The trailing moss and mystic glow Purple blossoms soft as snow My tears keep flowing to the sea Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief It takes a thief to catch a thief For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me
where the self-conscious poeticism is relieved by Dylan's familiar tricksy rhyming ("crimson", "limbs an'") and the admixture of nursery rhyme and familiar quotation; with
I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes I followed the winding stream I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys I know they're not what they seem In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain You'll never see me frown I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true And I'll be with you when the deal goes down
which undoubtedly have a certain charm, but border on pastiche.
Against this, Modern Times has strengths of his own. It is much better sung than its predecessor (though the musicianship is not of a similarly high standard), and its three best songs are outstanding. The first, Workingman Blues #2, is the closest the album gets to evoking the spirit of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The song features some of the strongest, most evocative writing of the album, for instance, in this reminder that all of us, rich or poor, walk in the valley of the shadow of death:
The opening lines seem to have an extra topical relevance as the world's economy goes into recession:
There's an evenin' haze settlin' over the town Starlight by the edge of the creek The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down Money's gettin' shallow and weak The place I love best is a sweet memory It's a new path that we trod They say low wages are a reality If we want to compete abroad
However, this is no rewrite of North Country Blues or Hollis Brown. Its narrative element is non-linear and its protagonist's situation more complex; whoever the singer is supposed to be, he is hardly the typical working man. Dylan is unlikely to usurp Springsteen's status as the poet laureate of the blue collar worker. It's a complex song full of strong images, memorable lines, and with a rousing chorus.
Even more impressive is Nettie Moore, one of Dylan's great ballads, and a song that he has invariably interprets powerfully in concert. A notable feature of the song, despite its folk ballad form, is its saturation in the language of the blues. The opening line quotes the old song "Lost John":
Lost John standin' by the railroad track Waitin' for the freight train to come back
while later lines evoke the famous story of Frankie and Albert. The crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil is also evoked. As with many of Dylan's recent songs, it is difficult to say what this collage of recollected and original lines means, but the song is undoubtedly highly evocative.
And finally, the album's closer Ain't Talkin', a mysterious and somewhat sinister epic that returns us to some extent to the atmosphere of Time Out of Mind. The claim that Modern Times was the final album of a trilogy stemmed from his record label rather than the artist himself; in fact, Dylan has specifically denied it. Nevertheless, this dark tale of a man walking, walking, walking, until he reaches the edge of the world (which he appears to doubt is round as men say) brings us full circle to the earlier album, which opens with the words "I'm walking..." and thereafter uses the image of the singer walking "a thousand miles from home" (or rather a million miles) repeatedly as a symbol of his isolation from society. The song begins with a reminiscence of the story of Mary Magdalene mistaking the risen Christ for the gardener of the grounds; but this "mystic" garden is a place of violent menace where "wounded" flowers hang from the vine and the singer is struck from behind. The singer himself threatens to slaughter his enemies if he ever catches them sleeping. He is not alone (which separates him from the isolated figure of TOOM, who seems more of an autobiographical than the mysterious narrator of "Ain't Talkin'), but accompanied by a band of brothers who "share my code", a faith that's long been abandoned, as he walks through a world of hostile infidels and "cities of the plague". The song raises more questions than it answers, and when the narrator steps off the end of the world in the song's final lines, we still have no idea who he is supposed to represent. Several lines in the grim discursive narrative are borrowed from Ovid's self-pitying letters from his exile on the Black Sea, the Tristia, but the story seems closer to Homeric epic than classical elegy. Although it raises more questions than it answers, as a performance it is gripping, full of menace, horror, and intensity.
I leave you with videos of these three songs, each of them a classic of the modern Dylan.
Workingman Blues #2 was a song Bob found difficult to make effective in its first year of live performance. It wasn't until the Australian tour of 2007 that the song really came into its own. It is now a regular concert standout. The following video is identified only as "live 2008"; great sound, though poor video.
Here's a fine Nettie Moore from 2006:
And here's my favourite performance of Ain't Talkin' (Melbourne, Australia 19th August, 2007):
Last October BBC radio broadcast "Dream Dylan Live", a show featuring 10 live performances from across the years cobbled together into a "virtual live show."
In truth, this would have been few people's "dream" concert in the sense of the ideal live Bob Dylan show. On the other hand, the show accurately conveyed the impression of "a series of dreams"— random and unconnected performances each making a strong, vivid impression, but offering no coherent raison d'être.
Only two tracks were unknown to collectors. I may have been the first, on a Dylan internet forum at least, to suggest that Blowin' in the Wind and Only A Pawn in Their Game from this programme could have been from Dylan's Carnegie Hall concert of 23th October, 1963.
This suggestion was pure conjecture, no more than educated guess on my part, based purely on the fact that the 1963 Town Hall and Carnegie Hall concerts are known to have been recorded by Columbia; a live album culled from the two shows was prepared for release in 1964, and then aborted, for reasons that remain unclear.
Both 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Only A Pawn in Their Game' were performed at the Carnegie Hall concert. In 2005, Sony-Columbia released two songs from the Carnegie show on Bootleg Series 7: No Direction Home, and a further six songs on a bonus disc available to purchasers of the Bootleg Series CDs and the Bob Dylan Scrapbook. So it seemed natural to deduce that the two songs donated to the BBC for 'Dream Dylan Live' were among those considered but rejected for release in 2005. (Why not just release the whole concert already? It's a far better performance than the 1964 Halloween Concert released as Bootleg Series Vol.6.)
To my consternation, my conjecture was immediately circulated as fact. Apparently the rest of the Dylan community were thinking on the same lines as I. Nevertheless, in the world of Dylan collccting, things have rarely been as they have seemed. A few months ago, the bootleg label Hollow Horn finally ended Columbia's 45-year striptease with regard to this show (unveiling a track or two every so many years) and released this historic show in its entirety, and in stunning quality. This followed the final release of the even more historically important Town Hall concert a few months earlier.
I've been much too busy to compare the performances of Blowin' and Pawn on the Hollow Horn release with the Dream Dylan Live performances until now. In fact, I just assumed that my initial guess was right.
Well guess what—I was only 50% on target! The DDL Blowin' in the Wind is indeed the Carnegie Hall one. There are at least two fairly conclusive fingerprints that establish this identification. In the first place, Bob sings "How many times can a man turn his back" rather than the more usual "turn his head." And he adds a word in another line: "How many times must a man look up/Before he can really see the sky..."
However, "Only A Pawn in Their Game" is NOT the same performance! This is pretty obvious, because in the Dream Dylan Live performance, after the lines "The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid/And the marshals and cops get the same" Bob forgets the lyrics and sings a garbled version of the rest of the verse!
So we have a bit of a mystery. This is quite clearly a 1963/4 performance, but does not correspond to any known performance. It's not the Greenwood, Mississippi version (the live debut), the Lincoln Memorial version, or the version that was performed live on WNET 30 July, 1963. Nor is it the version from Philadelphia, 28th Sept, 1964. My best guess is that it could be from one of the Newport Folk Festival concerts/workshops. But it's definitely not the 26th July evening performance, which was released last year on The Other Side of the Mirror. So the question remains: what other show from this period was recorded by Bob's record company? I am thinking Royal Festival Hall, London 17th May, 1964, two tracks from which emerged on the "Fantasy Acetate" a few years ago. But for goodness sake, don't quote me on it this time! (It still sounds more like a '63 performance to me, and I'm sticking with my guess of an unchronicled Newport performance...)
It should be obvious that the above two versions of the same song are different performances. Goodness knows why Bob's people decided to give the BBC a flawed performance when they had the faultless Carnegie Hall one....
Note: mp3s on this blog have each been downloaded over 200 times; no one has yet said thank-you. In lieu of thanks, I would be grateful if a few of you could click on the Google ads on this page. I earn a few cents per click, which enables me to stay on line! Thank you in advance!
I shall be posting mp3s of the other unofficially released Carnegie Hall tracks in due course.
Left: Falconet's statue of Peter the Great, who built St. Petersburg as his "window on the West."
For the first time in 30 years I am able to combine my day job (as a translator of the Russian press) with one of my main hobbies (appreciation of the music of Bob Dylan). So to follow up on my blog the other day, in which I translated the review of a highly perceptive Russian beat fan, here is a look at what the Russian press had to say about Bob's recent concert in St. Petersburg.
Right: bootleg art by StewART.
It was Peter's city, or rather the great poem about it by Alexander Pushkin, "The Bronze Horseman", that inspired me to take up the learning of Russian 30 years ago. Peter built his city in spite of nature, at an enormous cost in human life, as his "window on the West" through which he hoped Western culture would pour, enabling him to rouse up Mother Russia from what he perceived as her oriental backwardness, symbolised in Falconet's statue (above left) by the snake beneath the feet of Peter's fiery steed as he rears it up before the abyss on its giant pedestal, the Thunderstone, sometimes said to be the largest stone ever moved by man. To this day "Peter", as the city was known to its habitants even in Soviet times when it was officially named Leninngrad, remains the most Western of Russian cities, and hence, as the Russian website fontaku.ru notes, much more suited to Bob Dylan than the "white stone city" (i..e. Moscow), where Bob performed three songs at an invitation-only poetry festival way back in 1985.
The Russian press is, as regards youth culture, like the British and American press of 40 years ago; it claims to speak for the fans, but rarely makes any attempt to canvass their opinion. Whereas the admirable beatgene stated quite clearly that she hadn't expected Bob to perform her favourite songs, Kommersant (one of the few bastions of independent journalism remaining in Putin's Russia) assumes that the fans had been expecting the most familiar Dylan songs, and that Bob was guilty of showing contempt for the St. Petersburg public by not performing them.
The setlist looked as if the the maestro had no idea of where he was playing, or before whom. Or else he sincerely and entirely didn't give a damn. Fans of Paul McCartney, for instance, have seen him perform twice already on the territory of the former USSR, and only now are able to permit themselves to timidly ask the idol to play at his concert in Kiev on 14th June one or two things apart from a gentlemanly selection of "greatest hits." From the point of view of world culture, Bob Dylan is a figure of equal weight, but he was performing here for the first time since 1985, for the first time since an unsuccessful performance before an ideologically irreproachable and absolutely indifferent audience at an evening of world poetry that was timed to coincide with the Festival of Young People and Students in Moscow. To all intents and purposes, the concert in the Ice Palace was his first proper performance in this country. And he comes onto the stage and sings the following collection of songs:
"Cat`s in the Well" from the 1990 album Under the Red Sky. "Don`t Think Twice, It`s All Right" and "Girl of the North Country" from The Freewheelin` Bob Dylan (1963). "Honest with Me" from "Love And Theft" (2001). And seven of the 10 songs on the 2006 album Modern Times.
No one expected Mr. Dylan to perform a programme consisting only of songs from his "best of" collections; clearly he is still promoting his universally very well received album "Modern Times". But take the 2007 three-CD collection "Dylan", a more thorough compilation than many "best of" CDs, based as it is not just on the sixties golden period. Of the songs enumerated above, only one is on this compilation—"Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." In other words, for his début in Russia, Mr. Dylan chose songs that aren't too well known anywhere in the world. At least that was the concert blueprint by and large: to play the little-known and completely new. But he nevertheless did offer a few of his calling cards. "Just Like A Woman" and "Highway 61 Revisited" were there, and the final number was the song that comes to mind when you figure out how Bob Dylan should end his concerts—"Like A Rolling Stone. But if "Just Like A Woman" was performed with at least some kind of hint at the possibility of singing along with it, the two other hits were played as if deliberately without even the most minimal hook that an audience wishing to express their respect for a classic could latch on to.
This quality of "podpevayemost'" (literally 'being able to sing along with') appears important to Russian audiences: beatgene herself mentioned being surprised and disconcerted by its absence. Is this what one goes to rock concerts for in Russia? To sing along with the songs just as they are on your records (or illegal downloads, more likely) at home? At any rate, this is not a quality that many songs as performed on the Never Ending Tour, or at any other stage in Bob's career, have had. He is not interested in being "the legend", or in the Russian phrase, "a classic" demanding respect, but in recreating his songs according to his current whim. Nevertheless, as this is likely to be his one and only performance before a Russian paying audience, I can't help wishing that for once the old bastard had been willing to acknowledge where he was and meet the audience half way. Russians do have an almost religious reverence for poets and performers, and they do like to indulge this bardolatry wherever possible. Their troubled history of the Russian people has meant that artists and poets in Russia have always carried the burden that Bob shook off early on in his career; that of expressing the true thoughts and feelings of the people. But they revere the poet for his words, not for his fame or whatever goes on in his private life. Should Bob have forgotten the lyric sheets that of late have become a fixture on his keyboard, there is little doubt that the entire audience would have been able to prompt him, in thick Russian accents, of course, just as readily as they did me when, at some dinner party or other in Moscow 20 years ago, I attempted to recite a poem by Aleskandr Blok while fully loaded on bootleg vodka and forgot some of the words. Everyone in the room joined in reciting the long dead poet's words.
Just who was the audience for this particular show, apart from beatgene and her fellow beat fans, as we have seen? According to fontaku.ru it was
a curious symbiosis of members of the older generation and young people. There were hippies and kids in trendy gear. What didn't happen was any sense of a "crowd." It was perfectly obviously that each of the spectators had his own Dylan, his own history of relations with his songs, it was impossible to speak of any kind of mass concert ecstasy. The audience was predominantly male, and the women were from the intelligentsia category. There were no "dumb blondes." Many spectators, with serious-looking faces, whispered the words of the songs in English; there were quite a few foreigoners. You would thing that such a tedious concert would quickly become boring; after all, nothing was happening outwardly on state; but there was in both a musical and poetic sense. internal drama. The sound was not loud; it was even like chamber music; but the band played with impeccable style. And for a man of 67, Dylan sung very well: the timbre was clear, the voice strong, even, and far more powerful than on the records.
A rather tepid review; and yet, considered as just another show by the modern Bob Dylan, the St. Petersburg concert was actually pretty good, on the evidence of the already circulating recording by the ubiquitous taper who goes by the name of Bach (hence the inevitable "Bach in the USSR" jokes). As on the US and Canada leg of the tour, Bob is in very good voice, and the performances are anything but indifferent. The band is even coming to life a bit, with noticeably more dynamic solos by Denny Freeman. Although it would be stretching things to suggest that the setlist was in any way tailored toward the audience, it's possible to imagine that Girl of the North Country was chosen as a tip of the hat to the "Venice of the North", as the city of Peter the Great is often called, or even to the name of the venue itself. And Workingman Blues #2 would have struck a chord with many in a nation that has gone from a drab, but equitable socialism, to an unbridled form of capitalism in which the rich are very wealthy indeed, and the poor can barely make ends meet. The buying power of the proletariat has certainly declined since Soviet times (when there was nothing to buy, but all necessities were dirt cheap). Modern times in Russia are very hard for a large percentage of the population.
Nevertheless, Tangled Up in Blue was in the setlist as if to remind everyone that Russia was just "another joint" on Dylan's endless road (or it could be because it was one of the songs written under the influence of Dylan's Russian-born art teacher, the mysterious Norman Raeben; or even just because it is the only Dylan song that mentions revolution!). It's a shuffling, bluegrass-tinged version with some new, somewhat half-baked lines:
He drifted down to New Orleans where he was lucky enough to be employed Three times on a sailing boat, three times it was destroyed
Ouch. Rather better are:
She was working in "the Tropicana" I stopped there for a beer I told her I was goin' on later (?) She said, "I'm gonna stay right here."
Bob whips out the ol' harmonica before and after the last verse. Altogether a more enjoyable version than some of the breakneck versions of the recent past. Other songs worth mentioning are Just Like A Woman, well sung with a lengthy harmonica intro; a smouldering rendition of It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Russians need no reminding that "propanda, all is phony"), with Dylan's keyboards maybe higher in the mix than usual; and a mesmerising Ain't Talkin'.
Here are some mp3s, with thanks to the aforementioned "Bach":
and a DVD (exclusive to Amazon: see inset).
when it's released..gif)
(link to David Wright's translation for Oxford World Classics, which appears to be the edition Bob is using), he would no doubt have appreciated this "animal song"! Perhaps his attitude to his sources can be summed up in a line from this tale: "Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille."
