Bob Dylan (14 page)

While most of the singing on
Street Legal
(the pronunciamentos of “No Time to Think,” for example: “Loyalty, unity / Epitome, rigidity”) falls short of creepiness, it’s impossible to pay attention
to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time. Why should this be, when again and again—especially during those times, such as before the release of
Blood on the Tracks,
when both his fans and detractors had written him off—Dylan has proved himself as expressive and inventive as any singer in American music? I don’t know the answer; merely not giving a damn whether his record is good enough for his audience might be a big part of the problem. But I also think that the near-constant touring Dylan has done since 1974 (all that raw chanting in big halls, all that gruff railing over the band) has at once produced a new vocal style, destroyed Dylan’s timing, and dissolved his ability to bring emotional precision to a lyric. In the singing style Dylan is using now, emotion has been replaced by mannerism, subtlety by a straining to be heard.

His word-to-word emphasis, when it isn’t pure hokum, is patently random, so the good lines come off no better than the bad. Dylan has always written throwaway lines as a necessary means to setting up the line he’s put his heart into, but when he sang, he’d toss off the throwaways, bury them, and then rush back with everything he had. What he was really setting up was an ambush for the listener—that’s a lot of what “Like a Rolling Stone” is about. There are no such dynamics here. With little or no sense of rhythm in the singing, you can’t stay with the music. Either it becomes an irritant or you stop hearing anything at all.

There have been bad Dylan albums before—but
Self Portrait
had “Copper Kettle,”
New Morning
“Sign on the Window” and “Went to See the Gypsy,”
Planet Waves
“Wedding Song,” and
Desire
“Sara.” The collapse of Dylan’s timing ensures there are no such odd gems on
Street Legal.
Timing can spark an ordinary lyric with genius or a pedestrian arrangement with magic; no one who has heard Dylan swing “Al
right
” in “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence” or push the Hawks through the 1966 Manchester version of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” can doubt it. On “Get Your Rocks Off,” an unreleased basement tapes performance, he even
laughs
in time—or makes the rhythm recreate itself around his laugh. Here the only hint of decent singing comes in the first four verses of
“New Pony”—and it’s the sort of blues Dylan can sing in his sleep, and probably does.

The most interesting—if that’s the word—aspect of
Street Legal
is in its lyrics, which often pretend to the supposed impenetrability of Dylan’ mid-sixties albums, the albums on which his reputation still rests. But the return is false. You may not have known why Dylan was singing about a “Panamanian moon” in “Memphis Blues Again,” but you knew what “Your debutante just knows what you need / But I know what you want” meant, and it meant a lot. In
Street Legal
’s “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)”—the parenthetical part of the title is the most inspired thing on the record—“Well, the last thing I remember / Before I stripped and kneeled / Was that trainload of fools / Bogged down in a magnetic field” is just a gesture, just a wave at the fans. Not that the effect of the lines can’t hurt: it’s hard not to hear the older songs now in terms of the new numbers that appear to resemble them, and then conclude that at bottom “Absolutely Sweet Marie” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are as empty as “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat),” even if that’s not remotely true.

I mean, if I want a joke, I’ll listen to Steve Martin sing “King Tut.” That line “He gave his life for tourism” is really funny.
⁷

 

Street Legal
(Columbia, 1978).

 

Steve Martin and the Toot Uncommons, “King Tut” (Warner Bros., 1978).

18 December 1978

 

Bob Dylan is onto something with his new show—the big band, the three women on backup vocals, the stagy singing, nightclub demeanor, and patently rehearsed gestures—and whatever it is it seems to have been brewing for a long time. In 1969, when Dylan had been off the road for more than three years (and would not return for another five), Jann Wenner of
Rolling Stone
asked him about his touring plans. Dylan, presumably eager to deflect the question, promised he’d be back in public straight off. Then this odd exchange took place:

 

WENNER: What thoughts do you have on what kind of backup you’re going to use?

DYLAN: Well, we’ll keep it real simple, you know . . . drums . . . bass . . . second guitar . . . organ . . . piano. Possibly some horns. Maybe some background voices.

WENNER (clearly amazed): Girls? Like the Raylettes? DYLAN: We could use some girls.

 

Now, coming on the heels of
John Wesley Harding
and
Nashville Skyline,
which defined simple in somewhat different terms, Dylan’s idea of appropriate accompaniment had to seem like a joke, a way of saying,
Get off my back, man—how do you expect me to know what I’m going to do on stage when I haven’t the slightest intention of setting foot on one?
When Dylan finally did tour again, in 1974, he used the Band, just as he’d done in 1965 and ’66—no girls in sight. Shouting his greatest hits over the crowd, he could hardly have been more insular: the legend walked, but he didn’t talk, nor did he crack a smile.

Arriving on waves of bad press for two not-quite-sold-out
shows at the Oakland Coliseum Arena this November, Dylan was plainly out to prove that his new act was no joke. “A lot of writers have called this ‘showbizzy’ or ‘disco,’” he muttered near the end of the two-and-a-half-hour concert I saw, “but you know that isn’t true.” Some of the music was awful, some of it was dull, but there were moments of real strength, and I found myself caught up in Dylan’s performance even when his singing was at its worst.

The show takes some getting used to. There are almost a dozen people on stage, some of them occasionally looking for ways to keep busy; the lighting changes constantly. The music had no body. Dylan remarked with pride that his saxophone man, Steve Douglas, had worked with Phil Spector; it was only after wondering why everything Douglas played was utterly lacking in imagination that I remembered that Spector used sax solos strictly as filler. While Dylan radically revamped his best-known songs, successfully rescuing them from nostalgia—he sang a lot of greatest hits, but they didn’t come off that way—the band almost never stretched its arrangements. As hasn’t often been the case with Dylan’s concerts, there was no edge to the music; the limits were all fixed in advance.

Perhaps for just that reason, Dylan seemed more at home on stage than I’ve ever seen him. Laconic; hanging on to the mike the way Sinatra used to lean on a lamppost; combative; clumsily but unselfconsciously dancing—always, he communicated hard-won pleasure. When, for his last move of the night, he struck a pose reminiscent of nothing so much as a forties movie queen mugging at a premiere, the release of tension—release from the tension of a cataclysmic big-band version of “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” release from the tension of his mysterious career—was overwhelming. I laughed out loud.

As Elvis Presley could only do with parody, Dylan has escaped much of the pressure that weighs on the legendary figure, and unlike Elvis, he’s done so without belittling his music. What he may be onto, what may have been brewing all these years, is a lust for the kind of melodrama that is the stock-in-trade of the great soul
and country stars: a show that, since Dylan doesn’t need a show to orchestrate his status, is paradoxically big enough to bring him down to ordinary size. The most striking number of the concert was a slow, intimate version of “Tangled Up in Blue,” a long, biographical (but only archetypically autobiographical) narrative Dylan all but acted out, opening up the song with a physical and conversational freedom he’s never before had on stage. The tune, a high point on
Blood on the Tracks,
seemed to expand: it seemed so much richer, so much more
interesting,
that I leaned forward, afraid to miss a word. It may be that this sort of intimacy is possible for Dylan only in a show he can get lost in—a show so unlikely, so unwieldy, that the preconceptions of his mostly white, middle-class audiences (hardly attuned to the trappings of James Brown or Tammy Wynette) bring to his performance cannot survive it. The result, for Dylan, is a new range: a range that takes in playfulness, trash glamour, and entertainment for entertainment’s sake, and freezes out life-and-death drama.

There’s no image-mongering in such a context, and no mystification. Dylan is not just putting everybody on with his allusions to the style of Neil Diamond (or maybe more to the point, Bette Midler). Nor is he angling for a new career in Las Vegas, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up there soon, if only to see if he could pull it off. To see Dylan on stage today is to see the follies of a bohemian in Disneyland. Dylan is delighted to find that he can take pleasure in aspects of American culture that must have seemed alien—but still seeing no reason why, as he works certain of those things into his style, he should do so
exactly.
Like his timing during so much of his singing, Dylan’s showbiz gestures are off the mark; they’re still his gestures, and not really an imitation of anyone. Bob Dylan has been many things over the years, but he’s never been a very good purist.

 

Bob Dylan,
At Budokan
(Columbia, 1979). Bare on record, an apotheosis of what Tom Kipp calls sludge: musical clichés as their own complete, absolutely self-referential language.

24 September 1979

 

Listening to the new Bob Dylan album is something like being accosted in an airport. “Hello,” a voice seems to say, as Dylan twists his voice around the gospel chords of “When He Returns.” “Can I talk to you for a moment? Are you new in town? You know, a few months ago I accepted Jesus into my life, and—” “Uh, sorry, got a plane to catch!” “—and if you don’t you’ll rot in hell!”

Slow Train Coming
is the first testament to Bob Dylan’s recent embrace of a certain version—southern Californian suburban—of fundamentalist Christianity. Produced by the rhythm and blues legend Jerry Wexler, with Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers on guitar and drums, it’s an initially commanding but ultimately slick piece of music: “a professional record,” as Dylan has said. The record offers surprises—Dylan celebrates his belief in Christ with the blues, which is nicely heretical; his singing is often bravely out of control—but they’re irrelevant to the burden Dylan is seeking to pass on to whoever will listen. What we’re faced with here is really very ugly.

It’s not that
Slow Train
is drenched in religious imagery, or that a Jew has decided that the New Testament truly completes the Old. Throughout his career, Dylan has taken biblical allegory as a second language; themes of spiritual exile and homecoming, and personal and national salvation, have been central to his work. In “All Along the Watchtower,” Dylan defined a crisis of faith—faith in life. The song remains as profoundly religious as any in pop music. What is new is Dylan’s use of religious imagery not to discover and shape a vision of what’s at stake in the world but to sell a prepackaged doctrine he’s received from someone else. Despite an occasional sign of life (“She can do the Georgia crawl / She can walk in the spirit of the Lord,” Dylan sings, and who knows what the Georgia crawl is, or wouldn’t like to know?), the songs on
Slow Train
are monolithic. Jesus is the answer, and if you don’t believe it, you’re fucked.

Religious revival courses through our history as a response to collapsing social structures and the need for values that make sense of struggle. Dylan is preeminently an American artist, and conversion, after one has spent years as a quester and a solitary, is a preeminently American way of continuing one’s quest—not within the vast open spaces that once filled the country and still fill the American mind, but within the warmer confines of solidarity, of fellowship, of a church. But conversion is also a way of ending a quest, of falsely settling all questions. With
Slow Train,
we don’t touch the liberated piety of the Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey, who abandoned a career as Georgia Tom, master of the dirty blues, to write “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (For Me)”; we don’t sense the awful tension of Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, who could sing about the light without ever finding a way to live in it. Dylan’s new songs have nothing of the sanctified quest in them: they’re arrogant, intolerant (listen to the racist, America-first attack on Arabs in “Slow Train,” a pretty good tune; listen to what’s said about anyone who thinks answers are not the question) and smug. Much of the writing is insultingly shoddy—some of the songs are no more than glorified lists. This is not the music of a man who’s thinking something through, but of a man who’s plugging in.

“You either got faith or you got unbelief / And there ain’t
no
neutral ground,” Dylan chants; in case you imagine he’s using faith as some kind of spiritual metaphor, he quickly adds: “Sister, let me tell you about a vision I saw . . . You were tellin’ him about Buddha / You were tellin’ him about Mohammed in one breath / You never mentioned one time the Man who came / And died a criminal’s death—” And on and on, screed upon screed.

The best religious music makes me wish I could put aside my emotional and intellectual life and accept what the singer has accepted; though I can’t, or won’t, I can at least recognize the absence of the singer’s joy, clarity, and commitment in my own life. Dylan’s received truths never threaten the unbeliever, they only chill the soul, and that is because he is offering a peculiarly eviscerated and degraded version of American fundamentalism. In “Do
Right to Me, Baby,” the devastating entreaties of Matthew 5.44 are corrupted. “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” turns into you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours. Dylan is promoting a very modern kind of gospel: safe, self-satisfied, and utilitarian. There’s no sense of his own sin on
Slow Train,
no humility, and it’s less God than Dylan’s own choice that’s celebrated. Thus there are no moments of perfect sight, of deliverance, as there are on Van Morrison’s astonishingly rich new album,
Into the Music.
Where Morrison’s language is inspired—“Like a full-force gale / I was lifted up again,” he sings, “I was lifted up again by the Lord”—Dylan’s is ranting, full of promises that are false because they have been made banal. “There’s a Man on the Cross / And He be crucified for you,” Dylan affirms. “Believe in His power / That’s about all that you gotta do.”