Bob Dylan (6 page)

When the album ends, with two religious inventions—the first a spoken paragraph of what sounds like a TV preacher’s sermon, the second a ghostly Calvinistic rumble—one finds that, again, the songs comment on each other, as the Oral Roberts corn of the last strains of “Three Angels” (“But does anyone hear the music they play? Does anyone even try?”) is undercut by the stern testament of “Father of Night.” After a bit, the two songs begin to fade into each other, each gains in interest, and the joke of “Three Angels” takes on a little of the force of “Father of Night.”
New Morning,
as an album, has a context from which each song grows but to which no song submits.

This is an American album with a western impulse (“Movin’ west,” as we used to say), and “Sign on the Window” may lie at the heart of
New Morning.
“Sign on the Window” is the richest of the
twelve songs and perhaps the best recording Dylan has ever made. His versatile piano work lies beneath much of the album; here, he’s playing mostly by himself. The band and the girls move in briefly between verses, but it’s Dylan’s performance:

“Sign on the Window” is the other side of “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” in a way, the tale of the man who didn’t get to make the trip. One can see the singer, drunk in a town somewhere east of the Mississippi, as his isolation deepens into exclusion. “Sure gonna be wet tonight on Main Street,” goes a line, and the power of Dylan’s singing and of his piano makes that feel like the best line he ever wrote. Gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, but you know, there’s nowhere else to be.

Dylan plays out the emotion of the song on his piano. “Build me a cabin in Utah,” he sings as it ends. “Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout . . . That must be what it’s all about.” It’s certain that these last lines will be hailed as Bob Dylan’s new message to us all, but they’re hardly that. When a wife and a trout stream settle easily on the same plane, that’s not a way of life but the ease of a dream. A cabin in Utah is the sort of dream one needs when it’s gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, when fantasy is set against experience.

Rather than “What it’s all about” or even what this one song is all about, it’s that old American urge, that old half-question: “There must be a place that’s open, yet...” How far west do you have to go to be free? It’s a very great song, a love song moving west on the first American dream.

 

 

This fine album comes only a few months after Dylan’s mostly unsuccessful
Self Portrait.
Not only does
New Morning
rock with the
vitality that
Self Portrait
lacks, but Dylan’s decision to release a new record without the usual year’s wait is in itself an act of vitality. One of the functions of rock ’n’ roll is the disruption of cultural patterns, and, by extension, of rock ’n’ roll patterns. Dylan has, to some degree, broken the rule of reserve that seems to have been governing his career, and in doing so he has brought some life back to the rock ’n’ roll scene.

In the last year or so, the rock ’n’ roll audience has become fragmented, as the music lost that public character that comes out of our common participation in the event on which the music of the ’60s was founded—the Beatles. One man’s meat may be another man’s poison, but we gave that line the lie back in 1965, when the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan revealed the making of a common imagination accessible to each of us. Now that Captain Beefheart fans sneer at the legions of Led Zeppelin, who sneer right back, Dylan is offering an album of humor and depth, and it may well be accepted as a gift by almost all of the audience, as something to be held in common and as something to be shared.

As the lines and phrases of
New Morning
pass into our speech, we may find that Bob Dylan’s remarkable new songs not only speak to us, but give us the means by which we can, for a time, speak among ourselves.

 

Bob Dylan,
New Morning
(Columbia, 1970).

 

Lately it’s been difficult to tell the commercials from the hits, and it’s not because the commercials are getting any better. The summer charts are ghastly and almost every slot in the top ten is filled
by some hokey Hollywood production number with a trick chorus line.

But now Bob Dylan, the Who, and Creedence all have new singles: “Watching the River Flow,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Sweet Hitch-Hiker.”

Dylan’s seems like the best.

It’s getting the least airplay.

I’m not sure why this is so—it may be simply because it doesn’t have that creepy Hollywood sound—but I have the feeling Dylan outsmarted himself on this one. “Watching the River Flow” is nothing fancy, good beat, good humor, good AM noise. But as with most of Dylan’s records, there’s more here than there seems to be—and the first impression turns out to be a joke on the listener.

But that only works if the listener is forced to hear the record often enough to get beyond the first impression. In this case, the first impression is that Bob Dylan is setting up the usual private scene: “I’ll sit here and watch the river flow.” Well, that’s certainly a boring idea. It’s the implicit message of just about everything James Taylor has ever written, whole bands are being built around the basic sentiment, and people are eating it up when they can get it cheap—that is, implicitly—but maybe they don’t want it when they have to pay for it, in a confrontation with an explicit statement of withdrawal that can be so easily reversed into the mirror image of their own.

Then there’s the probability that one of the reasons people listen to Dylan is that he usually seems to be ahead of the game in some way, and to hear his music and his songs is to get some idea of what’s going on and what’s going to happen, in music and in musical communication. And there are those hopes for a more obscure and tantalizing sort of intelligence that never seem to go away. But if Dylan is merely riding a trend, even if he started it, a good part of his charisma automatically cancels itself out.

And then, in a completely general sort of context, there are the curious rumors about Dylan’s private life, which are, yes, a matter of his own business, and also public property—if you know about
them you can’t very well lobotomize yourself into forgetting them: support for the Jewish Defense League, trips to Israel, putting up office buildings with Dick Cavett. None of this stuff may be true, but it’s all in the air, and like those stories about a young Bob Dylan running away from home every month or so, it doesn’t much matter if they’re true or not. You don’t make a rational separation between True and False when you hear a record, you just hear it, and its sound combines with the grapevine into pop. And in this case that adds up to Dylan as this strange one-man model of how to make up for one’s wild and odious youth. Sort of missing the point, as Stu Cook of Creedence Clearwater put it, that we all get to be thirty someday,
we’re
going to be thirty, not the people who were thirty when people first began to worry about such things. Or, as someone put it to a friend of mine when he took over a fancy magazine: “
You
are them.” Don’t we remember how we were all supposed to stop liking rock ’n’ roll when we turned eighteen?

We don’t have to believe this stuff anymore; we have to learn how to act out its negation. We have to make being thirty in the seventies and eighties as different as being twenty in the sixties was from being twenty in the fifties. So I wonder about Bob Dylan, who seems to be working in the opposite direction. Can we trust this guy?

The first impression one gets from “Watching the River Flow” doesn’t even raise this question, because that first impression is so
bland.
“I’ll just sit here and watch the river flow.” The music is really quite nice but it sounds like the cut that was left off the first Leon Russell album because it was too pat. The guitar playing is good but you can hear it coming, and when it comes it sounds just like you expected it would. As a musical composition the song is an extension of “One More Weekend,” which came out of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Everything about the music is well done, all of it is familiar, and none of it is very exciting. It’s as deeply a part of a trend as anything could be. I can’t recall another Dylan record that had music with such a complete absence of
his
musical personality. Even on
Self Portrait,
maybe especially there,
one was part of a certain realm of
Dylan
music, inimitable and unrepeatable, and this is Russell music, and not even because he plays on the record. The lack of Dylan’s presence in the sound or the style of the band here is another element in the record’s blandness—one of the things that’s exciting about a Dylan record is that it’s a
Dylan record!
and there’s no Dylan in this music. I think that’s another reason why it isn’t getting played much, why people don’t seem to care whether they hear it or not.

Contrasted to the good Leon Russell music, though, is another new Dylan voice—humorous, in its manner paternal, wise as hell, and very hip. Not only is Dylan contrasting his vocal sound to Russell’s sound, it’s a sound we haven’t heard before. You don’t hear it right away, not the DJs giving the record those first few tentative plays to see if anyone calls in in response and then dropping it when nobody does, and not the Dylan fans who wouldn’t dream of calling up a Top 40 station and talking to one of those platter-chattering squares they hire.

The song itself has nervous words that are turned into a joke by the way Dylan sings them. People are fighting and breaking down right in the street and the singer is pacing back and forth trying to find some way to deal with it all. “Daylight’s sneakin’ through the window and I’m still in this all-night café” (and that’s songwriting—look at how much he gets into one line). He’s bored out of his mind by this river bank that for some reason holds him with its own obscure inertia.

You thought I hadn’t noticed, huh? You thought while I was learning Hebrew I forgot how to speak English?

Or this way:

Wow, says the voice, I rhymed it!

Hmmm. Rock ’n’ roll is fun. I’d almost forgotten.

Dylan is still working on his myth of retirement and withdrawal, which from a different perspective is simply the problem of the private artist and art that seeks to make itself completely public. There’s very little slack in his songs these days; they are perfectly controlled little statements, not so much about where Bob Dylan’s head is at as about where he thinks the possibilities of staking out your own ground lie; how you deal with the world without being captured by it. The leitmotif of
New Morning
was that “12th Avenue bus moving west,” and again and again the songs addressed the same problem: escape. The whole album moves west, but it never really gets there. That, in the end, is what makes it so American. The only way to keep the West from turning into what you left it for is not to go. Then the dream still means something.

Good humor turns sour. If one scene comes down too strong you can split back to the place where you were born and see what it looks like, but it’s not only that you can’t go home again—who would want to? Then dreams take over. You can always get away for a weekend—assuming the babysitter’s free—but “Sign on the Window” isn’t about a second honeymoon, it’s about a second life. Does the smelly 12th Avenue bus pull up at a trout stream in Utah? But that cabin, wife and kids, fish and a big sky—that’s a powerful dream. Its power, rather than its irrelevance, was most likely the thing that made so many of us critics deny it so quickly, as if we were overjoyed that the bus never really left New York. Nothing was resolved, but plenty was revealed.

Now Dylan is looking at it all from the other side, rocking a little harder, singing a little louder, playing the fading image of the country gentleman against the older one of the city boy, the memory of the flaming youth against the puzzled father. His songs, it seems, are about growing up without growing away—from his audience as well as from his own past—the possibilities of change without betrayal. Dylan is smart enough to have always been aware
that there are real questions as to whether or not those things are possible. There’s little question that he lacks the answer and even less that he’s interested in looking for one.

But Dylan’s manipulation of his own themes—themes that he has appropriated and made his own—brings up strange problems that even he may have missed, like how to make a hit record. I think the most interesting thing about “Watching the River Flow” is that it isn’t a hit, and why not. In this case, my guess is that the time has passed when people are interested in hearing Bob Dylan say he’ll just sit there and watch the river flow, and even though that’s not quite what he’s saying, it is what people hear. If they are too impatient to hear him contradict himself, it may be because Dylan is becoming a victim of his own subtlety. I think the time has come when Dylan has to conquer the audience all over again, if he wants to have one. And I hope he’s interested in trying
that.

 

Bob Dylan, “Watching the River Flow” (Columbia, 1971).

March 1972

 

The whole Bangla Desh set was premiered over the radio a few nights ago, neatly coinciding with the Indian Army’s rout of the West Pakistani forces and the liberation of the East, thus putting the sweet seal of history on the cause that launched this record in the first place. Three of us sat listening for an hour or more, though admittedly we weren’t as polite as the audience at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh at Madison Square Garden last August: we turned off the first half-hour of Ravi Shankar. Then the Harrison-Leon Russell-Mad Dogs & So On part began.