Bob Dylan (11 page)

Obviously, death is not very universally accepted. I mean, you’d think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact.

 

I think one can hear what Bob Dylan was talking about in the music of
The Basement Tapes,
in “Goin’ to Acapulco,” “Tears of Rage,” “Too Much of Nothing,” and “This Wheel’s On Fire”—one can hardly avoid hearing it. It is a plain-talk mystery; it has nothing to do with mumbo-jumbo, charms or spells. The acceptance of death that Dylan found in traditional music—the ancient ballads of mountain music—is simply a singer’s insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about;
it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back. It is the awesome, impenetrable fatalism that drives the timeless ballads first recorded in the twenties; songs like Buell Kazee’s “East Virginia,” Clarence Ashley’s “Coo Coo Bird,” Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues”—or a song called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” put down by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928. “I wish I was a mole in the ground—like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down—And I wish I was a mole in the ground.”

Now, what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to really comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his life, and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised; like a mole in the ground, he wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one; he wants to destroy the world, and to survive it.

Dylan and the Band came to terms with such feelings—came to terms with the void that looks back—in the summer of 1967; in the most powerful and unsettling songs on
The Basement Tapes,
they put an old, old sense of mystery across with an intensity that has not been heard in a long time. You can find it in Dylan’s singing and in his lyrics on “This Wheel’s on Fire”—and in every note Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko play.

And it is in this way most of all that
The Basement Tapes
are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory; it might be why
The Basement Tapes
are, if anything, more compelling today than when they were first made, no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” or Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” The spirit of a song like “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” matters here not as an influence, and not as a source. It is simply that one side of
The Basement Tapes
casts the shadow of such things, and in turn is shadowed by them.

18 October 1976

 

There was a moment in Bob Dylan’s recent
Hard Rain
TV special, filmed in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the end of the Rolling Thunder tour, that I hope I never forget: when Dylan turned “Idiot Wind” into the roughest outlaw ballad in the book. Just into the first verse he lowered his head; with a turn of a line, he seemed to take in the whole history of the place in which he was singing, to understand in an instant the lives of such Colorado killers as Kid Curry and the Sundance Kid. His face alive with evil and glee, Dylan was suddenly the lowest, dirtiest, meanest killer of them all. “I can’t help it—if I’m
lucky.
” His eyes snapped and I cringed.

The show was filmed without competence or imagination. The radical chic A-rab outfits were dumb, and it was obvious even while watching that Dylan’s presence was overshadowing any questions of musical quality. But that presence was so strong, so nasty, that it cut through everything in its way. The man came across. I was shocked when the credits ran; nothing like an hour seemed to have elapsed. As far as I was concerned the show could have gone on all night.

But
Hard Rain,
the soundtrack (and then some, and less some) of the show, is Dylan’s worst authorized album—without Dylan’s visual presence the music dies on the turntable. I never saw the Rolling Thunder tour, and the Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Folkie Division) concept of the affair sounded less than thrilling, but it’s hard to believe the jumbled, random, offensively casual mess on this album represents the best music the tour produced. The musicians don’t play, they bump into each other. Dylan doesn’t phrase, he bleats, and for the first time in his career, he sounds stupid. There is no musical attack, no rhythm, no craft. The arrangements are pointless—nearly nonexistent, as with “Memphis Blues Again,” or philistine, as with “Maggie’s Farm.” (Are those long, ridiculously drawn-out pauses after every verse, in which Dylan
sounds like a dying horse, meant to give the song impact, or draw applause, which is all they do?) Occasionally, the tunes generate an initial momentum; it’s dissipated almost immediately by the indifference of the performers. They sound as if they could, you know, care less. As a document of a tour where almost every show was taped, this makes no sense (and where are the songs introduced
on
the tour, like the old ballad “Railroad Boy,” “Going, Going, Gone,” or “Where Did Vincent Van Gogh?”).

The tour reportedly ended badly—wearing out, with audiences declining, money disappearing into ballooning expenses. You could think this album represents the resentment felt by the musicians toward a public that ultimately refused to salaam to them. Whether that’s so or not, what I hear in this music, in its dogged lack of charm or groove, is utter contempt for the audience. And that contempt may well be the other, duller side of Dylan’s nastiness, of that malicious intensity he exposed on television with “Idiot Wind.” Focused and revealed, that nastiness is at the heart of Dylan’s art. Unfocused—and disguised as camaraderie with busy, chattering music—it’s merely irritating, and, worse, it is empty.

 

Bob Dylan,
Hard Rain
(Columbia, 1976).

30 December 1976

 

The late Junior Parker made the original recording of “Mystery Train” in 1953, taking the first lines—
—from the Carter Family’s “Worried Man Blues,” which dates from the twenties, though no one knows exactly where the Carter Family got it. It is a very old song. When the Band went after the tune an hour or so into their farewell concert at Winterland Thanksgiving night, the song sounded new. I had heard Parker sing it, and Elvis, and Paul Butterfield, and I had heard the Band’s version, with new lyrics, on
Moondog Matinee,
their oldies album; this was something else entirely. Both Levon Helm, singing lead, and Richard Manuel played drums; Paul Butterfield played harp; and together they began a jumping beat that kicked with greater force each time the tune turned a corner. I have never heard Butterfield play with such strength: his harmonica was a hoodoo night call hovering over the crowd, cutting through the event of the Band’s last performance to show why such a performance could have become an event in the first place. The Band held nothing back; they played with an intensity I’ve seen them attain only occasionally over the years—behind Dylan in 1965, on the second night of their debut performance at Winterland in 1969, with Dylan in 1974 on “Highway 61 Revisited” and “All Along the Watchtower”—an intensity I’ve never forgotten.

Levon sang as if he were pleading for mercy—from God or from the devil, you couldn’t tell.

 

 

The concert was billed as the Last Waltz; the Band came up with a song of the same name, written mostly the day before the show and rehearsed backstage during the only break they took in their five-hour performance. As an event the affair was overblown, but the Band escaped the pretensions that surrounded it.

Over the years, the Band has become identified with a set of songs in a manner that distinguishes them, for good or ill, from all other rock groups: they are less their mystique, or their faces, than they are “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and other tunes from
Music from Big Pink
and
The Band.
The Band opened the show with such songs and they played them with greater precision and flair than I have seen in a long time. They came out of themselves; Rick Danko bopped across the stage, Robbie Robertson took extravagant solos, Garth Hudson roamed his organ like a tracker, his hair flying, and both Richard Manuel and Levon Helm seemed to sing with a special conviction. As I listened to their first number, “Up on Cripple Creek,” it struck me that I might never hear them play the song again; they had been playing it since that first night in San Francisco eight years ago, and I had never seem them play without it. I had carped that the Band never changed their stage material, but suddenly the song seemed permanent, rightfully unchanging, no more transitory than a personality. At that moment, it made no sense that they would not be playing the tune as long as they lived. I was caught up in the song; I couldn’t deal with it as a last anything, because it was a long way from wearing out.

They moved through various tunes, bringing on Allen Toussaint, there to conduct a horn section, and a fiddler, peaking at the end of “This Wheel’s on Fire,” always one of their high points (with Howard Johnson, who looks a little like Louis Armstrong, a little like Flip Wilson, and a lot like Roy Campanella, singing along, puffing his cheeks to sing just as he does with his tuba). They sang their recent single, “Georgia on My Mind,” recorded as their contribution to Jimmy Carter’s campaign (he was sent the master, and liked it—“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was the appropriate flip). Garth provided an intro straight out of “Song of the South,” while Manuel sang as a crooner, away from the piano. But the Band’s solo set broke open with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” They simply bore down harder on this song than I have ever seen them do before; there was a lot of love in the performance, and a certain desperation as well. The set also included

“The Shape I’m In” (sluggish, as it’s always been onstage), “It Makes No Difference,” “Life Is a Carnival,” “Ophelia” and “Stage Fright”; they closed with “Rag Mama Rag.”

Damned if someone didn’t yell for “Free Bird.”

Then the Band brought Ronnie Hawkins, the Arkansas rockabilly singer who recruited them as the Hawks in Toronto in the early sixties, onto the stage. Hawkins is no bigger than any two members of the Band put together; he is the ultimate fantasy of the unreconstructed rocker. He wore a huge, straw snap-brim hat, a black suit, a big beard, flashing eyes, a scarred face and a grin. The Band hit as tough a Bo Diddley beat as you’d ever want to hear and Hawkins commenced to prowl the stage, aiming “Who Do You Love” at the Band (“Take it easy, Garth, dontcha gimme no lip”), who had backed him on his classic recording of the song back in 1963. Hawkins howled, wailed, screamed, storming across the boards to fan Robbie’s guitar with his hat (“Cool it
down,
boy!”), a riff from the act the six men had shared thirteen years ago, and my favorite moment of the night.

Dr. John, dressed as a fifties hipster—gold shoes, sparkling jacket, beret pulled down over his head—followed, with “Such a Night.” Bobby Charles, also from New Orleans, came on for a rewrite of “Liza Jane”: Dr. John, Charles, Danko, Robertson, Manuel and Helm put across as modest and perfect a piece of New Orleans music as a place like Winterland could contain. Dr. John’s own tune had broken the mood, as the songs of most guests, when unidentified with the Band, would subsequently do, but singing as part of the group he brought it back.

Then came “Mystery Train,” and then, with Butterfield still on the stage, Muddy Waters, with his own guitarist and piano player. He sang a weak version of “Caldonia”; he is, after all, sixty-one. It was nice of the Band to invite him; most of them had played on his Woodstock album, and as Levon and the Hawks they had recorded Waters’s “She’s 19” back in ’63. It made sense. One conceived apologies, and then heard the Band and Muddy tear into “Mannish Boy.” Waters first cut it in 1955, when he was a mere forty, barely
younger than Hawkins is now, and suddenly the idea of aging, of over-the-hill, was satirized. Butterfield seemed to hold one dark note throughout the entire performance; Waters danced, jumped up and down; the Band smoked. It went on and on: “I’m a man . . . I’m a rollin’ stone...” They went for everything the song had to give, and when Waters left the stage, there was nothing left. The Last Waltz had been carefully worked out; there were two nights of rehearsals in San Francisco, weeks of rehearsals in L.A., and every number was literally scripted, line by line and shot by shot, for camera angles and setups. “Mannish Boy” might have been run through, but as Muddy and the Band played it, it could hardly have been rehearsed. It was a titanic performance.

Waters was followed by Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Neil Diamond, and for me the show lost its shape with their performances. Clapton played poorly, if spectacularly; neither Young’s tunes (“Helpless” and Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds”) nor Mitchell’s (three from a new album) nor Diamond’s (“Dry Your Eyes”) seemed to have anything to do with the Band musically; here the concert slipped towards more stargazing. It was at this point that speculation about additional guests began; one fan predicted that Buddy Holly would appear precisely at midnight, while another claimed to have seen the deceased Murry Wilson tuning up backstage.

As Diamond left Manuel turned the piano over to John Simon and began to sing “Tura Lura,” a song about an Irish lullaby; just as Manuel finished the last verse, Van Morrison made his entrance—and he turned the show around. I had seen him not many minutes before, prowling the balconies, dressed nondescriptly in a raincoat and jeans, scowling; but there he was onstage, in an absurd purple suit and a green top, singing to the rafters. They cut into “Caravan”—with John Simon waving the Band’s volume up and down, and the horns at their most effective—while Van burned holes in the floor. He was magic, and I thought, why didn’t he join the Band years ago? More than any other singer, he fit in, his music and theirs made sense together. It was a triumph, and as
the song ended Van began to kick one leg into the air out of sheer exuberance, and he kicked his way right off the stage like a Rockette. The crowd had given him a fine welcome and they cheered wildly when he left.