Bob Dylan (3 page)

Later someone called and asked for a reprise of “Blue Moon.” In the end it all came down to whether radioland really cared. The DJ kept apologizing: “If there is anyone who needs—or deserves to have his whole album played through it’s Bob Dylan.”

(2) After a false beginning comes “Alberta #1,” an old song now claimed by Dylan. One line stands out: “I’ll give you more gold than your apron can hold.” We’re still at the frontier. The harmonica lets you into the album by its nostalgia, and it’s the song’s promise that matters, not the song itself, which fades.

“What was it?” said a friend, after we’d heard thirty minutes of
Self Portrait
for the first time. “Were we really that impressionable back in ’65, ’66? Was it that the stuff really wasn’t that good, that this is just as good? Was it some sort of accident that made those other records so powerful, or what?

“My life was really turned around, it affected me—I don’t know if it was the records or the words or the sound or the noise—maybe the interview: ‘What is there to believe in?’ I doubt if he’d say that now, though.”

We put on “Like a Rolling Stone” from
Highway 61 Revisited
and sat through it. “I was listening to that song five, ten times a day for the last few months, hustling my ass, getting my act together to get into school—but it’s such a drag to hear what he’s done with it...”

 

(3) Something like a mood collapses with the first Nashville offering, “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” a slick exercise in vocal control that fills a bit of time. After getting closer and closer to the Country Music Capital of the World—and still keeping his distance with
Nashville Skyline,
one of the loveliest rock ’n’ roll albums ever made—the visitor returns to pay his compliments by recording some of their songs. How does it sound? It sounds all right. He’s sung himself into a corner. It sounds all right. Sign up the band.

GM: “It’s such an unambitious album.”

JW: “Maybe what we need most of all right now is an unambitious album from Bob Dylan.”

GM: “What we need most of all is for Dylan to get ambitious.”

JW: “It’s such a...”

GM: “. . . though it is a really...”

GM & JW: “. . . friendly album.”

 

(4) “Days of ’49” is a fine old ballad. Dylan’s beginning is utterly convincing, as he slips past the years of the song (listen to the vaguely bitter way he sings “But what cares I for praise?”). He fumbles as the song moves on, and the cut falls apart, despite the deep burr of the horns and the drama generated by the piano. It’s a tentative performance, a warm-up, hardly more than a work-tape. The depths of the history the song creates—out of the history of pathos Johnny Cash gave “Hardin Wouldn’t Run” (sounding like it was recorded in the shadows of an Arizona canyon) or “Sweet Betsy from Pike”—has been missed. The song is worth more effort than it was given.

“It’s hard,” he said. “It’s hard for Dylan to do anything real, shut off the way he is, not interested in the world, maybe no reason why he should be. Maybe the weight of the days is too strong. Maybe withdrawal is a choice we’d all make if we could...” One’s reminded that art doesn’t come—perhaps it’s that it can’t be heard—in times of crisis and destruction; art comes in the period of decadence that precedes a revolution, or after the deluge. It’s prelude to revolution; it’s not contemporary with it save in terms of memory.

But in the midst of it all artists sometimes move to rewrite history. That takes ambition.

 

(5) When you consider how imaginative the backing on Dylan records has been, the extremely routine quality of most of the music on
Self Portrait
can become irritating. It is so uninteresting. “Early Morning Rain” is one of the most lifeless performances on the entire album; a rather mawkish song, a stiff, well-formed-vowel vocal and a vapid instrumental track that has all the flair of canned laughter.

The Four Questions.
The four sons gazed at the painting on the museum wall. “It’s a painting,” said the first son. “It’s art,” said the second. “It’s a frame,” said the third son, and he said it rather coyly. The fourth son was usually considered somewhat stupid, but he at least figured out why they’d come all the way from home to look at the thing in the first place. “It’s a signature,” he said.

 

(6) “In Search of Little Sadie” is an old number called “Badman’s Blunder” (or sometimes “Badman’s Ballad” and sometimes “Little Sadie”) that Dylan now claims as his own composition. As with “Days of ’49,” the song is superb—it’s these kinds of songs that seem like the vague source of the music the Band makes—and what Dylan is doing with the tune, leading it on a switchback trail, has all sorts of possibilities. But again, the vocal hasn’t been given time to develop and the song loses whatever power it might have had to offer, until the final chorus, when Bob takes off and does some real singing.

This bit about getting it all down in one or two takes only works if you get it all down. Otherwise it’s alluding to a song without really making music.

Imagine a kid in his teens responding to
Self Portrait.
His older brothers and sisters have been living by Dylan for years. They come home with the album and he simply cannot figure out what it’s all about. To him,
Self Portrait
sounds more like the stuff his parents listen to than what he wants to hear; in fact, his parents have just gone out and bought Self Portrait and given it to him for his birthday. He considers giving it back for Father’s Day.

To this kid Dylan is a figure of myth; nothing less, but nothing more. Dylan is not real and the album carries no reality. He’s never seen Bob Dylan; he doesn’t expect to; he can’t figure out why he wants to.

 

(7) The Everly Brothers version of “Let It Be Me” is enough to make you cry, and Bob Dylan’s version is just about enough to
make you listen. For all of the emotion usually found in his singing, there is virtually none here. It is a very formal performance.

“Bob should go whole-hog and revive the Bing Crosby Look, with its emphasis on five-button, soft-shoulder, wide-collar, plaid country-club lounge jackets (Pendelton probably still makes them). And, like Der Bingle, it might do well for Dylan to work a long-stemmed briar pipe into his act, stopping every so often to light up, puff at it, raise some smoke and gaze, momentarily, toward the horizon, before launching into [this is John Burks in Rags, June 1970] the next phrase of ‘Peggy Day.’ Then, for his finale—the big ‘Blue Moon’ production number with the girls and the spotlights on the Mountains—he does a quick costume change into one of those high-collar 1920s formal shirts with the diamond-shaped bow tie, plus, of course, full length tails and the trousers with the satin stripe down the side, carnation in the buttonhole, like Dick Powell in
Gold Diggers of 1933.
Here comes Dylan in his tails, his briar in one hand, his megaphone in the other, strolling down the runway, smiling that toothpaste smile. ‘Like a
roll-
ing stone’...”

 

(8) “Little Sadie” is an alternate take of “In Search of...” I bet we’re going to hear a lot of alternate takes in the coming year, especially from bands short on material who want to maintain their commercial presence without working too hard. Ordinarily, when there are no striking musical questions at stake in the clash of various attempts, alternate takes have been used as a graveyard rip-off to squeeze more bread out of the art of dead men, or merely to fill up a side. “Little Sadie” fills up the side nicely.

“It’s a high school yearbook. Color pictures this year, because there was a surplus left over from last year, more pages than usual too, a sentimental journey, ‘what we did,’ it’s not all that interesting, it’s a memento of something, there’s a place for autographs, lots of white space, nobody’s name was left out . . . It is June, after all.”

(9) “Woogie Boogie” is fun. The band sounds like it’s falling all over itself (or maybe slipping on its overdubs) but they hold on to the beat. There is as much of Dylan’s feel for music here as anything else on
Self Portrait.
If you were a producer combing through a bunch of
Self Portrait
tapes for something to release, you might choose “Woogie Boogie” as a single—backing “All the Tired Horses.”

Self Portrait
most closely resembles the Dylan album that preceded it:
Great White Wonder.
The album is a two-record set masterfully assembled from an odd collection of mostly indifferent recordings made over the course of the last year, complete with alternate takes, chopped endings, loose beginnings, side comments, and all sorts of mistakes. Straight from the can to you, as it were. A bit from Nashville, a taste of the Isle of Wight since you missed it, some sessions from New York that mostly don’t make it, but dig, it’s Dylan, and if you wanted
Great White Wonder
and
Stealin’
and
John Birch and Isle of Wight and A Thousand Miles Behind, Self Portrait
will surely fill the need.

I don’t think it will. It’s true that all of the bootlegs came out in the absence of new music from Dylan, but I think their release was related not to the absence of his recordings but to the absence of the man himself. We are dealing with myth, after all, and the more Dylan stays away the greater the weight attached to anything he’s done. When King Midas reached out his hand everything he touched turned to gold, it became valuable to everyone else, and Dylan still has the Midas touch even though he’d rather not reach out. It is only in the last two years that the collecting of old tapes by Dylan has become a national phenomenon, and there are many times more tapes in circulation than are represented on the bootlegs. It sometimes seems as if every public act Dylan ever made was recorded, and it is all coming together. Eventually, the bootleggers will get their hands on it. Legally, there is virtually nothing he can do to stop it.

He can head off the theft and sale of his first drafts, his secrets, and his memories only with his music. And it is the vitality of the music that is being bootlegged that is the basis of its appeal. The noise of it.
Self Portrait,
though it’s a good imitation bootleg, isn’t nearly the music that
Great White Wonder
is. “Copper Kettle” is a masterpiece but “Killing Me Alive” will blow it down.
Nashville Skyline
and
John Wesley Harding
are classic albums; but no matter how good they are they lack the power of the music Dylan made in the middle sixties. Unless he returns to the marketplace, with a sense of vocation and the ambition to keep up with his own gifts, the music of those years will continue to dominate his records, whether he releases them or not. If the music Dylan makes doesn’t have the power to enter into the lives of his audience—and
Self Portrait
does not have that power—his audience will take over his past.

 

(10) Did Dylan write “Belle Isle”? Maybe he did. This is the first time I’ve felt cynical listening to a new Dylan album.

In the record industry, music is referred to as “product.” “We got Beatle product.” When the whirlwind courtship of Johnny Winter and Columbia was finally consummated everyone wanted to know when they would get product. They got product fast but it took them a while longer to get music.
Self Portrait,
which is already a triple gold record, the way “O Captain! My Captain!” is more famous than “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” is the closest thing to pure product in Dylan’s career, even more so than
Greatest Hits,
because that had no pretensions. The purpose of
Self Portrait
is mainly product and the need it fills is for product—for “a Dylan album”—and make no mistake about it, the need for product is felt as deeply by those who buy it, myself included, as by those who sell it, and perhaps more so.

As a throw-together album it resembles Flowers
¹
; but it’s totally unlike
Flowers
in that the album promises to be more than it is, not less. By its title alone
Self Portrait
makes claims for itself as the definitive Dylan album—which it may be, in a sad way—but it is still something like an
attempt to delude the public into thinking they are getting more than they are, or that
Self Portrait
is more than it is.

 

(11) “Living the Blues” is a marvelous recording. All sorts of flashes of all sorts of enthusiasms spin around it: the Dovells cheering for the Bristol Stomp, Dylan shadow-boxing with Cassius Clay, Elvis smiling and sneering in
Jailhouse Rock.
The singing is great—listen to the way Bob fades off “deep down insyyy
-hide,
” stepping back and slipping in that last syllable. For the first time on this album Dylan sounds excited by the music he’s making. The rhythm section, led by the guitar and the piano that’s rolling over the most delightful rock ’n’ roll chord changes, is wonderful. The girls go through their routine and they sound—cute. Dylan shines. Give it 100.

“. . . various times he thought of completing his baccalaureate so that he could teach in the college and oddly enough [this is from ‘A Rimbaud Chronology’]
²
of learning to play the piano. At last he went to Holland, where, in order to reach the Orient, he enlisted in the Dutch Army and sailed for Java in June of 1876. Three weeks after his arrival in Batavia [Charles Perry: ‘We know Dylan was the Rimbaud of his generation; it seems he’s found his Abyssinia’] he deserted, wandered among the natives of the jungle and soon signed on a British ship for Liverpool. After a winter at home he went to Hamburg, joined a circus as interpreter-manager to tour the northern countries, but the cold was too much for him and he was repatriated from Sweden, only to leave home again, this time for Alexandria. Again, illness interrupted his travels and he was put off the ship in Italy and spent a year recovering on the farm at Roche. In 1878 he was in Hamburg again, trying to reach Genoa to take a ship for the East. Once more he tried to cross the Alps on foot but in a snow-storm he almost perished. Saved by monks in a Hospice, he managed to reach Genoa and sail to Alexandria, where he worked as a farm laborer
for a while. In Suez, where he was stopped on his way to Cyprus, he was employed as a ship-breaker to plunder a ship wrecked on the dangerous coast at Guardafui. Most of the first half of 1879 he worked as a foreman in a desert quarry on Cyprus, and went home in June to recover from typhoid fever.”
³