Bob Dylan (4 page)

 

(12) “Like a Rolling Stone”—Dylan’s greatest song. He knows it, and so do we. Not only that, but the greatest song of our era, on that single, on
Highway 61 Revisited,
on the tape of a British performance with the Hawks in 1966. If one version is better than the other it’s like Robin Hood splitting his father’s arrow.

1965: “Alright. We’ve done it. Dig it. If you can. If you can take it. Like a complete unknown, can you feel that?”

We could, and Bob Dylan took over. All that’s come since goes back to the bid for power that was “Like a Rolling Stone.”

“Can you keep up with this train?” The train no longer runs; I suppose it depends on where your feet are planted.

Dylan from the Isle of Wight is blowing his lines, singing country flat, up and down, getting through the song somehow, almost losing the whole mess at the end of the second verse. You don’t know whether he dropped the third verse because he didn’t want to sing it or because he forgot it. It’s enough to make your speakers wilt.

Self Portrait
enforces or suggests a quiet sound. “Like a Rolling Stone” isn’t “Blue Moon” but since most of
Self Portrait
is more like “Blue Moon” than “Like a Rolling Stone,” and since it is a playable album that blends together, you set the volume low. But if you play this song loud—very loud, until it distorts and rumbles—you’ll find the Band is still playing as hard as they can, for real. Their strength is cut in half by the man who recorded it, but volume will bring it back up.

Some of “Like a Rolling Stone” is still there. A splendid beginning, announcing a conquest: Levon Helm beating his drums over the Band’s Motown March (ba-bump barrummmp, ba-bump barrrummmp), smashing his cymbals like the glass-breaking finale of a car crash; and best of all, Garth Hudson finding the spirit of the song and holding it firm on every chorus. Near the end when the pallid vocalizing is done with, Dylan moves back to the song and he and the Band begin to stir a frenzy that ends with a crash of metal and Bob’s shout: “JUST LIKE A ROLLING STONE!” There is something left.

1965: “BAM! Once upon a time...” The song assaults you with a deluge of experience and the song opens up the abyss. “And just how far would you like to go in?” “Not too far but just far enough so’s we can say we’ve been there.” That wasn’t good enough. “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you.” It peered out through “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “All Along the Watchtower,” but it seems Dylan has stepped back from its edge.

The abyss is hidden away now, like the lost mine of a dead prospector. “Like a Rolling Stone,” as we hear it now, is like a fragment of a faded map leading back to that lost mine.

I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.

 

(13) Why does “Copper Kettle” shine (it even sounds like a hit record) when so many other cuts hide in their own dullness? Why does this performance evoke all kinds of experience when most of
Self Portrait
is so one-dimensional and restrictive? Why does “Copper Kettle” grow on you while the other songs disappear?

Like “All the Tired Horses,” it’s gorgeous. There are those tiny high notes punctuating the song in the mood of an old Buddy Holly ballad or “The Three Bells” by the Browns, and that slip-stream organ, so faint you can barely hear it—you don’t hear it, really, but you are aware of it in the subtlest way. There is the power and the real depth of the song itself, that erases our Tennessee truck-stop postcard image of moonshining and moves in with a vision of nature, an ideal of repose, and a sense of rebellion that goes back to the founding of the country. “We ain’t paid no whiskey tax since 1792,” Bob sings, and that goes all the way back—they passed the whiskey tax in 1791. It’s a song about revolt as a vocation, not revolution, merely refusal. Old men hiding out in mountain valleys, keeping their own peace. (The old moonshiners are sitting around a stove in
Thunder Road,
trying to come up with an answer to the mobsters that are muscling in on the valley they’ve held since the Revolution. “Blaf sprat muglmmph ruurrp ffft,” says one. The audience stirs, realizing they can’t understand his Appalachian dialect. “If you’d take that tobacco plug out of your mouth, Jed,” says another whiskey man, “maybe we could understand what you said.”)

What matters is Bob’s singing. He’s been the most inventive singer of the last ten years, creating his language of stress, fitting five words into a line of ten and ten into a line of five, shoving the words around and opening up spaces for noise and silence that through assault or seduction or the gift of good timing made room
for expression and emotion. Every vocal was a surprise. You couldn’t predict what it would sound like. The song itself, the structure of the song, was barely a clue. The limits were there to be evaded. On “Copper Kettle” that all happens, and it is noticeable because this is the only time on
Self Portrait
that it happens.

“Not all great poets—like Wallace Stevens—are great singers,” Dylan said a year ago. “But a great singer—like Billie Holiday—is always a great poet.” That sort of poetry—and it’s that sort of poetry that made Dylan seem like a poet—is all there on “Copper Kettle,” in the way Bob changes into the lines “. . . or ROTTEN wood...” fading into a quieted “they’ll get you—by the smoke...” The fact that the rest of the album lacks the grace of “Copper Kettle” isn’t a matter of the album being different or new. It’s a matter of the music having power, or not having it.

“. . . very successful in terms of money. Dylan’s concerts in the past have been booked by his own firm, Ashes and Sand, rather than [this is from
Rolling Stone,
December 7, 1968] private promoters. Promoters are now talking about a ten-city tour with the possibility of adding more dates, according to Variety.

“Greta Garbo may also come out of retirement to do a series of personal appearances. The Swedish film star who wanted only ‘to be alone’ after continued press invasions of her life is rumored to be considering a series of lavish stage shows, possibly with Dylan...”

And we’d just sit there and
stare.

 

(14) “Gotta Travel On.” Dylan sings “Gotta Travel On.”

 

(15) We take “Blue Moon” for a joke, a stylized apotheosis of corn, or further musical evidence of Dylan’s retreat from the pop scene. But back on Elvis’s first album, there is another version of “Blue Moon,” a deep and moving performance that opens up the possibilities of the song and reveals the failure of Dylan’s recording.

Hoofbeats, vaguely aided by a string bass and guitar, form the background to a vocal that blows a cemetery wind across the lines
of the song. Elvis moves back and forth with a high phantom wail, singing the part that fiddler Doug Kershaw plays on Dylan’s version, Elvis finally answering himself with a dark murmur that fades into silence. “It’s a revelation,” said a friend. “I can’t believe it.”

There is nothing banal about “Blue Moon.” In formal musical terms, Dylan’s performance is virtually a cover of Elvis’s recording, but while one man sings toward the song, the other sings from behind it, from the other side.

 

(16) “The Boxer.” Remember Paul Simon’s “How I was Robert Mac-Namared into Submission,” or whatever it was called, with that friendly line, “I forgot my harmonica, Albert”? Or Eric Anderson’s “The Hustler”? Maybe this number means “no hard feelings.” Jesus, is it awful.

Before going into the studio to set up the Weathermen, he wrote the Yippies’ first position paper, although it took Abbie Hoffman a few years to find it and Jerry Rubin had trouble reading it. A quote:

“I’m gonna grow my hair down to my feet so strange till I look like a walking mountain range then I’m gonna ride into Omaha on a horse out to the country club and the golf course carrying a
New York Times
shoot a few holes blow their minds.”

“Dylan’s coming,” said Lang.
⁴

“Ah, you’re full of shit” [said Abbie Hoffman in his Woodstock Nation ], “he’s gonna be in England tonight, don’t pull that shit on me.”

“Nah, I ain’t kiddin’, Abby-baby, he called up and said he might come . . .”

“You think he’d dig running for president?”

“Nah, that ain’t his trip he’s into something else.”

“You met him, Mike? What he into?”

“I don’t know for sure but it ain’t exactly politics. You ever met him?”

“Yeah, once about seven years ago in Gertie’s Folk City down in the West Village. I was trying to get him to do a benefit for civil rights or
something . . . hey Mike will you introduce us? I only know about meetin’ him through Happy Traum...”

“There’s an easier way . . . Abbs . . . I’ll introduce you. In fact he wants to meet you...”

Would
Self Portrait
make you want to meet Dylan? No? Perhaps it’s there to keep you away?

 

(17) “The Mighty Quinn” sounds as if it was a gas to watch. It’s pretty much of a mess on record, and the sound isn’t all that much better than the bootleg. The Isle of Wight concert was originally planned as an album, and it’s obvious why it wasn’t released as such—on tape, it sounded bad. The performances were mostly clumsy or languid and all together would have made a lousy record. Two of the songs had something special about them, on the evidence of the bootleg, though neither of them made it onto
Self Portrait.
One was “Highway 61 Revisited,” where Bob and the Band screamed like Mexican tour guides hustling customers for a run down the road: “OUT ON HIGHWAY SIXTY-ONE!” The other was “It Ain’t Me Babe.” Dylan sang solo, playing guitar like a lyric poet, transforming the song with a new identity, sweeping in and out of the phrases and the traces of memory. He sounded something like Billie Holiday.

It’s certainly an odd self portrait: other people’s songs and the songs of a few years ago. If the title is serious, Dylan no longer cares much about making music and would just as soon define himself on someone else’s terms. There is a curious move toward self-effacement: Dylan removing himself from a position from which he is asked to exercise power. It’s rather like the Duke of Windsor abdicating the throne. After it’s over he merely goes away, and occasionally there’ll be a picture of him getting on a plane somewhere.

 

(18) “Take Me as I Am or Let Me Go.” The Nashville recordings of
Self Portrait,
taken together, may not be all that staggering but they
are pleasant—a sentimental little country melodrama. If the album had been cut to “Tired Horses” at the start and “Wigwam” at the end, with the Nashville tracks sleeping in between, we’d have a good record about which no one would have gotten very excited one way or the other, a kind of musical disappearing act. But the Artist must make a Statement, be he Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, or Tommy James and the Shondells. He must enter the studio and come out with that masterpiece. If he doesn’t, or hasn’t bothered, there’ll be at least an attempt to make it look as if he has. If Dylan were releasing more music than he’s been—say, a single three times a year, an album every six months or so—then the weight that fixes itself on whatever he does release would be lessened. But the pattern is set now, for the biggest stars—one a year, if that. It’s rather degrading for an artist to put out more than one album a year, as if he
has
to keep trying, you know? Well, three cheers for John Fogerty.

 

(19) “Take a Message to Mary”: the backing band didn’t seem to care much about the song, but Dylan did. My ten-year-old nephew thought “It Hurts Me Too” sounded fake but he was sure this was for real.

Ralph J. Gleason: “There was this cat Max Kaminsky talks about in his autobiography who stole records. He stole one from Max. He had to have them, you know? Just had to have them. Once he got busted because he heard this record on a juke box and shoved his fist through the glass of the box trying to get the record out.

“We all have records we’d steal for, that we need that bad. But would you steal this record? You wouldn’t steal this record.”

You wouldn’t steal
Self Portrait?
It wouldn’t steal you either. Perhaps that’s the real tragedy, because Dylan’s last two albums were art breaking and entering into the house of the mind.

 

(20) Songwriting can hardly be much older than song-stealing. It’s part of the tradition. It may even be more honorable than outright imitation; at least it’s not as dull.

Early in his career, Bob Dylan, like every other musician on the street with a chance to get off it, copped one or two old blues or folk songs, changed a word or two, and copyrighted them (weirdest of all was claiming “That’s All Right,” which was Elvis’s first record, and written—or at least written down—by Arthur Crudup). Dylan also used older ballads for the skeletons of his own songs: “Bob Dylan’s Dream” is a recasting of “Lord Franklin’s Dream”; “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” finds its way back to “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill.” “Pledging My Time” has the structure, the spirit, and a line from Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen”; “Don’t the moon look lonesome, shining through the trees,” is a quote from an old Jimmy Rushing blues. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” comes off of Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” This is a lovely way to write, and to invite, history, and it is part of the beauty and inevitability of American music. But while Dylan may have added a few words to “It Hurts Me Too,” from where he sits, it’s simply wrong to claim this old blues, recorded by Elmore James for one, as his own. That
Self Portrait
is characterized by borrowing, lifting, and plagiarism simply means Bob will get a little more money and thousands of people will get a phony view of their own history.