I've been itching to write one of
these ever since the Better Late Than Never feature started, 'cause I have a
doozy. Now, I know we all worry that we're missing something big. For some
reason—okay, let's just blame the Internet—we hold ourselves
responsible nowadays for knowing practically everything. The tribalism that
used to save us from, say, taking disco seriously, has gone away. Guys like
Nick Drake get dragged out of the archives and dropped on the college kid
must-know lists. Hell, people even talk about David Axelrod.
Except I'm not going to whip talk
about any of those people. Here's my confession: in all my life, and after
several years of writing about music, I have totally slept on Bob Dylan. I
don't mean that I didn't spend enough time on Dylan. I'm
saying that until a couple months ago, I had never played a Dylan record
straight through. I had zero interest in the guy. And I have no excuse.
It's not that I haven't had time:
I'm 34. It's not that I skipped the '60s: when I was a teenager in the pop
dustbowl of the late-'80s, I chewed through bands like the Beatles or the Dead.
And obviously I knew who the guy was. Dylan touched at least half the musicians
I ever listened to. He slipped weed to the Beatles and helped make the film Help!
so hilarious. He kicked Phil Ochs when he was down—and there's a guy I did listen to, thanks to my parents' copy of Pleasures of the Harbour. Even science fiction gives you no
escape: take Douglas Adams' mice quoting "Blowin' in the Wind," or the smarmy way
Cameron Crowe shoehorned The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan's sleeve
into Vanilla Sky, or—most bizarre of all—the Cylons
singing "All Along the Watchtower" last year on Battlestar
Galactica. Dylan's so heavy, he's intergalactic.
Baby boomers trip over themselves
talking about his genius. On HBO's In Treatment, Gabriel
Byrne enjoyed a quick smug moment of comparing him to Walt Whitman, and he's
not the first to stick Dylan in that canon. And that's his biggest problem: he
still belongs to the boomers. They discovered him, they claimed him as the
voice of their generation, and to this day they're insufferable about the guy.
One of my uncles—the one I stole so many Grateful Dead and Jethro Tull records
from, back in the day—put it this way: to get Dylan, you really had to
understand those times.
About Dylan, I'm an endless font of
ignorance. For my crash course I focused on 1966's Blonde on Blonde—one of the top ten greatest rock 'n
roll records ever, according to just about every critic over 50—and I prepped
with exactly two sources, the documentary No Direction Home, and Wikipedia. I learned some
pretty fascinating stuff. I had always pegged Dylan as an icon for
hippies—but I didn't know that he was the entertainment at Dr. Martin
Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. I knew the folkies got ticked when he made
it big and left behind the "topical song" movement, but hearing folks like Pete
Seeger talk about how a torch had been passed from Guthrie down to Dylan—and
how Dylan basically left it smoking in the Village somewhere, to be picked up
by pretty much no one of consequence—well, I can see how that hurt.
Most refreshing of all, I also
learned that Dylan's a bullshit artist. It's not because he kept making up his
biography, or pulled stunts like stealing all those Woody Guthrie records
before he came to New York, but because he's mastered the art of distorting
small facts to get to the big truth. And sometimes he gets caught. When someone
who knows him as well as Joan Baez nudges him off his pedestal, it reminds you
not to get too swept up in his mystique. In a clip in No Direction
Home, we see Dylan playing "Mr. Tambourine Man" for a workshop at the
Newport Folk Festival. As he unspools one endless, cosmic lyric after another,
you can almost catch him crack a smile—like he's saying, "I know, I
know." When you realize he's not sure where all this comes from either, it
makes you wonder about the rest. And that's about when you get hooked.
But Blonde on
Blonde has a pretty low bullshit content. For one thing, much of it's
about women, and when you go there for real, it's hard to get cocky. For
another, Dylan has said that Blonde on Blonde is "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind"—and the
honesty shows. Neither rushed nor lazy, it reminds
me of works like John Fahey's America, John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, or Dr. Seuss's One
Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish—a work with no sharp peaks or
ruts or concern for loose ends, that feels like one long train of thought.
Blonde on
Blonde has been praised for hopping across several genres—it's
pop, it's country, it's blues, it's surreal—and for how naturally the
styles blend into one another: after you get past the first two tracks, it
settles into a spacious, organic vibe that's far moodier than his previous
electric albums. The
record opens with "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," which I started
skipping—it's too pat, and familiar from classic rock radio. It doesn't
hit its stride until track three, with "Visions of Johanna." You can hear a
harder, steadier version of it on the soundtrack album to No Direction
Home, and hearing that made me appreciate even more what a perfect
few minutes they caught here—the organic ramp-up, the way every lick from
the organ and guitar supports Dylan's voice, the lyrics that catch the
spotlight—"Mona Lisa musta had the highway
blues/You can tell by the way she smiles"—and the impressionistic lines
that stitch right into the absurd ones. It pulls off the great rock and roll
trick of sounding like the easiest, most natural thing in the world.
I won't try to parse the
lyrics here: I'll just leave them where most of the blurbs on Dylan do, and say
they're "surreal." Except when they're not. "I want you, I want you/I want you so
bad" makes sense. "Just Like a Woman" may puzzle with its oblique references to
real lovers and its vague misogyny—which would be easy to criticize, if so
many of us hadn't been there too, abusing the first good hand we have against a
lover. (He puts it a little more sympathetically in No Direction
Home: "You can't be wise and in love at the same time.") I've often
heard people describe Dylan as "difficult," either because the songs are long
or because of that voice. But the production is too warm to resist, and as for
the crooning, he doesn't really start moaning from the gullet until the last track,
"Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." But that's a love song, so it's hard to
complain; if anything, it seals my first impression of the album: this is one
of the greatest make-out records in rock history.
But while I worked on this piece, I
figured out something else. I finally understand why I never got into Dylan. And
even though I try to be cavalier about the whole thing, I'm starting to think
it's a personal failing.
One thing Dylan clearly taps into
isn't just the voice of a generation, or the reaction to the '60s, or the spirit
of rock and roll. He's part of the music of America. In addition to taking one
torch from Guthrie, he picked up another from the Beat Poets. Here's a quote
from his '66 Playboy interview, where he's
been asked what drew him to rock and roll:
Carelessness.
I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a
card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big
Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me
alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a
Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl.
Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down.
I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas
"before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook
fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and
burns the house down. The delivery boy—he ain't so mild: He gives her the
knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time
I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck
and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I
move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side,
who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that
can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery
boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down,
and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be
a star. What could I say?
It's beat, American, glorious, and
totally fake—like amber waves of bullshit.
But here's the thing: I'm in awe of
the old beat road fantasy—but I'm also wary. I've never read Kerouac's On the Road. But every couple years I reread Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a 1962 novel that doesn't say much about the
decade to come, but that could be fairly called a grandfather of cyberpunk. The
protagonist, Binx Bolling, lives in a bland suburb outside historic New
Orleans. Forsaking his romantic southern ancestry and its doctors and war
heroes, he works as a stockbroker, and watches a lot of movies. He observes
everything but doesn't risk much; he's too busy watching a scene to take part
in it.
Bolling's kind of a twit. But if
you're a pop culture nerd, it's easy to relate to Bolling—to his
profound, pointless quest for meaning, and his knack for seeing through other
people's bullshit. Watching No Direction Home, I was
intrigued by some of the exciting history it captured—the scene in the
Village, the Newport Folk Festival, the great concerts and parties and freak-outs
that would come throughout the '60s. But let's say you had the chance to travel
back in time: would you dive right in and blow your mind? Or would you worry
about not being at the right place at the right time? Would the hippie jug bands
and finger-pickin' freaks drive you nuts, and would the student radicals just sound
like a pack of… students? Or worse, would you get scared of missing the whole
point and wallflowering at the back, and never get high, laid or enlightened?
I grew up listening to music that
was either overcomplicated or overanxious, autistic composers playing prog and
avant-garde or post-punk pop bands that jittered and trembled. But as I hit
middle age, I'm trying to calm down. The song that sticks in my head from my
Dylan crash course is one of the slightest on this record, "4th Time
Around," with the crisp, rat-a-tat drum beat and Spanish guitars that are so
staccato they almost sound like the drums-and-wires I favor—except instead
of nervous, they sound exciting, and they can stay right on the
edge without clenching up. I know I can't do that.
Everyone sees a mystery in this guy.
Joan Baez slept with him, and got to hear about it on this
record—and even she can't figure him out. I'm just starting, but now I'm
hooked, too. I want to know how that nervous, wound-up kid you see in the
footage from the '60s can sound so sure and bold for hours at a time when he's onstage.
How he could stop staring at the crowd and make it stare at him. I need to
know: how'd he learn to believe in his own bullshit?