The Albums of Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan, where to begin, all the superlatives have been used; the man dominates, simply dominates, all are in awe of Old Zimmy, the Eternal Trickster. Eternally inscrutable, he is what a musician should be, known for his sound rather than his life, something that has being forgotten somewhere along the line, doused by lazy journalism, the public’s juvenile fascination with artists’ paltry affectations and the dumb editorial policies of the rags to feed them, indeed they even make them ravenous for it. Next week sees the release of his thirty-third studio album, Together Through Life (2009), how apt, The Old Wizened One has been around longer than most anyone playing, criticising or indeed listening to rock and roll. Sneak previews of the coming record have likened it to being quite similar to a Chess Record from the Fifties and that is Dylan - timeless. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters are as much Dylan’s bedfellows as Springsteen, Arcade Fire, Robert Johnson, Neil Young, Woody Guthrie, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, The Clash… the list is as endless as it is diverse. But that only is the tip of the iceberg, comparisons go further, centuries further in fact, back to Keats and Tennyson, this isn’t being in the slightest bit reckless, Dylan has being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature more than once; and so rubs shoulders with the likes of Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale and Saul Bellow. Of course, many may disagree, detesting the overly dramatic tag of Messiah that are so often ridiculously planted upon him. The dissenters point out his warbling voice, his many weak offerings and his unwavering acoustic and harmonica routine and ergo state that Dylan the prophet is a result of self hype, that the man behind the curtain is nothing more than the curtain.
If that is the case, it is all the more impressive, how could somebody maintain such a dedicated following since 1962, without having major talent, simple answer, they couldn’t. Criticising Dylan as simplistic, is maddeningly myopic, Dylan is an icon, in the proper meaning of the term, he is America, as Cadillac is, as Fitzgerald’s Gatsby is, as Bellow’s Augie March is, as Sinatra is, as Jimmy Dean is, as John Wayne is, as Coca-Cola is, as the Hollywood sign is, as Kentucky Fried Chicken is, as Wendy’s is, as Tarantino is, as Wall-Mart is; the point is like him or loathe him, he defines America. The thing is, Dylan himself would probably side with the dissenters. Admittingly, he contrived his past, moulding some type of Twain like upbringing, a wandering Tom Joad, but it created his future, to live that desired future, he required such a base. Remarkably, Dylan’s life became what he really wanted, he did in fact change his past, he became the backwoodsman, the seer of the dustbowl, the compelling enigma, the bard of shrouded Lost America. He trudged out to the near asylum that Woody Guthrie was unfairly housed in, taking the breath of the wandering soul, the prince at the ailing King’s bedside, being granted the keys of the kingdom (which he shirked, bizarrely the gatekeeper of a babysitter preventing him) but he caught the most important thing - the link - the link was his. After signing his first song publishing contract with Lou Levy, he had his celebratory meal in Jack Dempsey’s restaurant, shooting the breeze with the Champ. Again a link, Dempsey first won the World Heavyweight Title in 1919, his parents had smudges of Choctaw and Cherokee in them.
Dylan continued to forge links whilst in the uber-cool environment of Greenwich Village, as he burrowed away in the second-hand stores and beetled away in the libraries, studying the past, rooting out rare recordings, discovering lost ballads; examining the way that songs were crafted. It would serve him well, linking the stony ballads of old with the stylish leanings of the Village. He had his finger on the pulse but he created his own zeitgeist, he was re-inventing the role of folk singer-songwriter. He couch-surfed in some funky houses with fine literature which he hovered up, it would influence his later writings and it was diverse, very diverse, so the influence was rare and distinguished one. A smattering of which includes - Pericles, Machiavelli, Faulkner, Ovid, Byron, Shelley, Poe, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Milton…they all contributed into the moulding of the young Dylan. He was studying in an old school manner, like Joyce he was creating his own curriculum, keeping an eye on the city, matching the two, sussing how the modern bootlegger linked to The Prince. Indeed, later on when he was branded the mouthpiece of a generation it rankled him greatly. The accusers couldn’t understand his bitterness, why wouldn’t anyone desire to be the leader of the counterculture? Perhaps, one who believed himself to be more than simply the main man of a fleeting movement, one who believed himself to be around for a lot longer than that. However, the branding was inescapable, his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963) contained the protest songs, the articulate fury and catchy melodies that the movement were seeking. He became a pillar and he hated it.
Musically, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan would change everything and would create clones of Dylan in bars, student haunts and coffee hang-outs for generations to come. But whatever he did - bedding Joan Baez, walking off the Ed Sullivan Show, singing at the March on Washington, added to the allure, there could be no escape. He wasn’t doing himself any favours of escape by releasing the wonderful album The Times They Are a-Changing’ (1964), on which he tackled head-on the raging issues of the day - poverty, racism and social change. But Bob was a-changing too, he had never wanted to be leader of the protest, he recorded Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single, hot June’s evening; it was a light-hearted affair, chock-full of passionate love songs, Dylan was heading rock and roll, telling his self appointed disciples, it ain’t me babe, he was younger than all that now. His Bringing It All Back Home (1965) was a type of bridge, being half acoustic, half electric; it kept the folkies hoping that Dylan was still with them, that he was only flirting with the new sound. But the writing was evidently on the wall, anyone who composed a song like Subterranean Homesick Blues was not going to be constrained by one medium, indeed the song with it’s Beat influenced lyrics was a forerunner of rap and hip-hop. He plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival, the crowd booing their Judas, but it was too late for all that, Dylan hit the road with his new lieutenants The Band. And he wasn’t just making up the rock and roll numbers, from 1965 he began revolutionising it.
The masterpiece that is Highway 61 Revisited (1965) was like a cannonade, Dylan had drove away from Minnesota in 1961 to re-invent himself, only four years later he was thinking it all up again, back on the Blues Highway where Robert Johnson had sold his soul to the devil. Dylan was on another planet, the record came out of no-where and would define the era, everybody else was playing catch-up, everybody else was in the Dark Ages by comparison, as Springsteen later recounted of the opening track, Like a Rolling Stone, ‘it sounded like somebody had kicked open a doorway to your mind’. It shattered all limitations that people had presumed existed in music, people wondered at the mind of Dylan, wondering how he could possibly have conceived of such a sound. Bob had being trying to escape his devoted folk followers and in many ways had succeeded but from the pan to the fire, now everybody else but the folkies were his dedicated worshippers. It was too late to stop now, after a few false starts he recorded Blonde on Blonde (1966) in less than a week at Columbia’s studios in Nashville. Again it struck like lighting, nobody even knew Dylan was in Nashville or who he was recording with making the resultant masterpiece all the more mind-boggling. Not all the world was ready however, the following tour had fans booing and jeering, unable to understand that this new sound was the future, Dylan knew it, telling The Band to play it louder and harder whenever they met any resistance. Tragically, it may have ended thus, the cutting down of a prophet before his work was done.
On 29 July 1966, Bob suffered serious injuries following a motorcycle accident near his home in Woodstock, New York. He disappeared from public life, retiring behind the white picket fence with his wife and kids, the crowds attempted to seek out their saviour, but Dylan had being trying to escape the baying hordes for years, the accident cemented his resolve, he refused to tour for eight years, once again he was going to do things his way. Of course he continued to create, John Wesley Harding (1967) was a pared down, contemplative effort; informing the masses that he was not going to be their bard, that he was no longer going to be anybody’s dancing bear, they still lapped it up, it appeared that whatever Dylan did was cool - with most everybody; although John Wesley Harding went against everything that was hip at that time, like The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s (1967) or The Rolling Stones Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). And Dylan wasn’t just fooling around, he immersed himself even further in the country blues of Leadbelly and Hank Williams in his 1969 offering Nashville Skyline. He was attempting to get further and further from the masses, consciously not recording anything which might set them upon him once again. His Self Portrait (1970), definitely wasn’t going to have them knocking down his door, was Dylan purposely now producing shoddy work or had the muse flown? Everybody waited with bated breath, later that year he released New Morning (1970) which made up nobody’s mind, but it must be remembered that Dylan at this stage was not even thirty!
Surely, reports of his demise were greatly exaggerated. Of course they were, he lay low for quite some time, releasing Planet Waves in 1973 which was a good record by anybody’s standards bar Dylan’s. The Second Coming or was it the Third? Or even Fourth? arrived in the form of the outstanding Blood on the Tracks in 1975. The album was mainly influenced by Dylan’s break-up with his wife and the ending of his seemingly perfect home-life, poignantly he was troubled again and was once more producing his best work or at least work that the fans were going to gush over. It brought him back, all the way back, back to protest songs and Greenwich Village. He recorded a song that championed the cause of the boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter who had been wrongfully imprisoned for murder and he brought a number of musicians from the resurgent Greenwich Village folk scene on his Rolling Thunder Revue US tour. The tour coincided with the release of Desire (1976) which saw Dylan opening up to the big issues once again, even going global. Many people had viewed Blood on the Tracks and Desire has a return to form, though some die-hard fans still lamented the absence of the records of the mid-sixties, strangely forgetting that it was all a decade ago. His Street Legal (1978) played to neither sensibility, instead once again marking a radical departure, Dylan turning up with a large pop band complete with backing singers and brass section and the world audibly sighed. His voice always somewhat dodgy began to be brazenly attacked, a tad unfairly but the press were claiming that he was being found out when singing the awful lines that permeate the record. Undoubtedly, the production value of the album is dire, so bad in fact that many commentators viewed the recording as quite obviously a joke, again perhaps getting carried away by the god-like status that they appropriated upon Dylan in their wide-eyed and naïve youth.
Much of the fanfare surrounding Dylan began to dwindle, though it didn’t overly concern him, his next three albums Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980) and Shot of Love (1981) were of Christian Gospel music as he flaunted his new status as a Born Again Christian, follow that if you can! And if they were willing to persist they were in for a rollercoaster of a ride for the duration of the eighties. Infidels (1983) marked something of a recovery, Empire Burlesque (1985) was simply puzzling, Knocked Out Loaded (1986) is a sloppy affair while Down In the Groove (1988) with it’s orchestral number of contributors was dire. Salvation for the eighties came in the form of the Daniel Lanois produced Oh Mercy (1989). The sustained return to form that everyone desired however, was not to be, 1990’s Under the Sky was disappointing. Many thought that was it for Dylan, there had been too many false dawns and then Bob went off the radar, no new material was released for the guts of the nineties. However Dylan wasn’t finished yet, in 1997 he hooked up again with producer Daniel Lanois and released the critically acclaimed Time Out of Mind. Lanois seemed to bring out the best in Dylan, but also for Bob the shackles were off, just like when he was drifting around Greenwich Village, he was once again somewhat irrelevant, he was again on the margins. The album sparked something of a renaissance, quality albums being released at staggered intervals, Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006), the latter entered the US Billboard charts at Number 1, Bob was enjoying his dotage. And now in April 2009, at age 67, he releases his 33rd studio album, Together Through Life, his voice rattled, gnarled, ripped and torn - just the way he’s always wanted it, he’s now the genuine article, the link to the past, Woody Guthrie, a relic from the past, the guy who dined with Jack Dempsey and shared his supper with Tiny Tim.
About the Author:Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source Russell Shortt, http://www.exploringireland.nethttp://www.visitscotlandtours.com
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