Speaking Truth to Dylan
Posted on December 20, 2006
Filed Under Music |
With the caveat that he “is not a music blogger,” AKMA, in an end of year post on pop music, writes:
I was not as impressed with this year’s Bob Dylan album, Modern Times, as I was with Love and Theft. When I heard Love and Theft, I heard a new chapter in Dylan’s work, and I delighted what I took to be his perfect accomplishment. He laid claim to the folk tradition’s continual re-employment of its own history toward new performances that still bespeak the old; on Modern Times, I hear him say, “Oh, yeah, and another thing. . . .†I’ll keep it around and I’m prepared for it to surprise me (what would be more typical of Dylan?) on relistening, but it doesn’t make a “top†anything list for me.
Which is exactly how I felt about it. I still listen to Love & Theft; Modern Times . . . Hmm, I’ll have to remember to give it another listen one of these days. AKMA also notes that he “fail[s] the Joanna Newsom test” for coolness. He’s obviously cooler than I am, since I don’t know Ms. Newsom from Adam. Furthermore, I haven’t listened to enough new music this year to have a top ten list, or even a top five. I’ve been listening to a lot of Louis Armstrong & other early blues. And the other night I downloaded fifteen versions of the traditional ballad “John Henry” because I’ve been reading Scott Reynolds Nelson’s historical study, Steel Drivin’ Man. (I’m so hip.) I can strongly recommend versions by Big Bill Broonzy, Bill Monroe, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, as well as the Bruce Springsteen version from the Seeger Sessions CD, though I generally find Pete Seeger to be a pretentious prig. True to form, the Seeger version from the 60s folk revival days exhibits all the worst traits of that era, especially the very careful e-nunc-i-a-tion. You can see why Dylan wanted nothing to do with Seeger & the Sing Out! crowd when he was figuring out how to move beyond Woody Guthrie. You can also skip Van Morrison’s version from The Philosopher’s Stone CD. Starts out all right, but ends in a complete train wreck. The piano is particularly awful. I’m usually a huge Van Morrison fan — & have been since I was fifteen & listening to “Gloria” & “Here Comes the Night” on AM radio — but this track & most of the album are just a mess.
There were a couple of records I really liked this year, though. Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris produced a masterpiece in All the Roadrunning. I wrote about the record previously & would only add that Knopfler & Harris remind me, not only of Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash, but also of Richard & Linda Thompson. Knopfler & Harris are clearly aware of the Thompsons’ influence & acknowledge it explicitly with references to “Wall of Death” in the album’s title track. There is not a bad track on this CD & it contains the year’s absolute best up-tempo country love songs (that should be a Grammy category) in “Red Staggerwing” & “Belle Starr.” Both songs are funny, loving & really, really hot. I also liked Leonard Cohen’s new record. Cohen didn’t release a new album this year, you say? Oh, yes he did — it’s just disguised as a record by the pop / jazz singer Anjani. All the songs on Blue Alert are written by Cohen, though he doesn’t sing on any of the tracks. Cohen has always used female backup singers to fill in his one-dimensional voice & this is the logical extension of that device.
Getting back to Dylan. Just as the best new Leonard Cohen album this year was not by Leonard Cohen, the best new Dylan album was not by Dylan. And it’s actually from 2005. Dave’s True Story released a collection of Dylan covers called Simple Twist of Fate that pays respectful homage to the master without giving up their deft touch with music & lyrics. Kelly Flint’s voice has just the ironic inflection required to carry Dylan’s lyrics & David Cantor’s arrangements & guitar playing are attractive & unpretentious.
So that’s my top three list. Now I’m going back to Louis Armstrong playing “St. Louis Blues.” Here’s what the poet Hayden Carruth had to say about Armstrong’s recording of W.C. Handy’s blues, from his short essay, “Anthems,” from Suicides and Jazzers:
What a record it is. It should be required listening in every freshman course in the country. These numbers are the heart of the American tradition, in both substance and manner of performance. Granted, already when I was a boy W.C. Handy was referred to snootily as a poor musician and was accused of “stealing” his compositions from black folk sources and getting rich on them. Well, at least he was black himself, which ought to make it better than what Stephen Foster or Louis Gottschalk did, to say nothing of outright thieves like Sophie Tucker and Al Jolson. As to the former charge, I remember once hearing some very old dim recordings of the Handy Band from the late teens or early twenties, and they were awful. Truly. Quite as awful as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which was white, from the same period. What difference does it make?
Carruth goes on to rehearse the perennial charge that Armstrong sold out his early talent by becoming an “entertainer” at the expense of his early jazz genius before rightly dismissing the charge. We have the music. I’d go so fare as to suggest that Dylan has been subjected over & over again to the same sort of phony test of supposed authenticity. If there is a heaven, Dylan & Satchmo will be playing the blues together in some corner bar. That would be heaven for me, for sure. Entertainers.
Comments
9 Responses to “Speaking Truth to Dylan”
Stumble it!
It’s hard for me to distinguish Pete Seeger the activist from the singer, but I was always more stirred by the activist imagination than by the stage persona (I would probably have been too reserved to say “pretentious prig,” but I’d have been thinking it). Glad to hear similar sentiments from you.
Dissing Pete Seeger’s like dissing Mr. Rogers.
The withering rejection Dylan’s always turned toward those who in like manner dis such conventional artists as Bobby Vee and Ricky Nelson should instruct.
These are a consumer’s hierarchies, not a musician’s.
Sing Out! and Pete Seeger and Burl Ives and Dave van Ronk and most others who’d get dumped by the same criteria are just individual points on a long and wide continuum of music that started getting called “folk” when something else came along that couldn’t wear that name.
You may not like him or what he does, but a lot of kids out there grew up singing “Abiyoyo” and remember something much warmer than pretension or priggishness coming through the speakers and into their hearts and heads.
Seeger’s persona works for people who get scared by stripped-down revved-up bleeding-edgery. Like kids, or others who don’t know the moves yet. They don’t get to come too?
It’s okay with me that you don’t groove with him, that’s not it, it’s the unnecessary roughness of the insult. Try thinking of it as having something to do with the breadth of his audience, intended and actual.
On a more congenial plane, every Dylan album that’s knocked me out left me baffled the first time I heard it, except “Blood On The Tracks”.
cheers
Roy, I could dis Mr. Rogers. Defending Seeger by saying he is for kids is not much of a defense. I get your larger point, but I think the deeper problem with Seeger is that he peddled a kind of folk authenticity even as he was cleaning up & toning down his material. When I was 16 (in 1966) I bought Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home & it blew me away. It was only when I got interested enough in Dylan that in the following year I went back & listened to his earlier records, along with his sources, influence & contemporaries. You could say I’ve been doing that ever since. So I hear Dylan first, the Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, Richard & Mimi Farina, & the rest. That’s a mixed list, obviously. I think it’s a shame Farina died so young — he might have given Dylan a run for his money.
There’s a guy I can’t remember his name he showed up on one of those field recording compilations maybe Lomax maybe somebody else in Houston in the 50’s stone crazy street musician riffing all dithyrambic and banging on literal garbage cans for a drum effect as he launched long rhyming scores of indecipherable poetic accuracy.
That’s authentic.
Ramblin Jack, who’s got a great big web site now, is a monumental repository of the precise exact line between authenticity and whatever it is you call what that is when people absorb and regurgitate digested or no truer and more authentic sounds.
Nottamun Town becomes Masters of War.
Hendrix owns All Along The Watchtower.
The larger truth is the amplified echoing noise of that strange thing singing really is. And that goes back to the emotional intensity of singing when there were no houses and streets to make it a relatively safe occupation.
If you’re going to insist on it, which your lead-off sentence would indicate you are, dissing Mr. Rogers is something anyone can do, but doing it is lame and smacks of unresolved adolescent status conflict.
Dylan defends Bobby Vee, and not just because he got work from him in his early career, but because what Dylan sees in his immediate professional environment is what he also sees in Bobby Vee’s, who you may remember was famous for among other things an adenoidal version of Blue Velvet and the unforgettable Venus in Blue Jeans.
Dylan insisted on his station-wagon-driving bunch-of-kids-raising working-guy figure against the prophet-of-a-generation mantle somebody or other was consistently trying to fix him with.
The Band’s liner notes to Big Pink insisted on their loving relationship with their widely assorted families and true or not it was a position, the refusal of that rebels-with-extra-causes-to-spare thing that was building at the time as the inner-sleeve photo illustrated, that was vital and counter to the countering culture.
Mr. Rogers targeted an audience of kids who were watching TV and needed a comforting and absolutely safe leader. You can dis that all you want but it’s lame to do so, lame in a striving-after-glamor way that exhibits all the desperate haste of the consumer attack on everything, searching for authenticity as if it were mostly a valuable commodity, which yes Farina had in spades, also Eric von Schmidt and a bunch of lesser-known figures from that narrow moment between the orthodoxies of mediated beatnikery and the almost identical substancelessness of mediated hippieism.
Though Farina’s more direct confrontation with the Great Swinish Aggregate would have led to some form of assassinational intrigue eventually I think anyway no matter what, unless he spun it out into the near madness of psychedelic indeterminacy and camouflage as per. Viz his magnetizing opus “Been Down So Long”.
The Incredible String Band should be in there somewhere, and I think without proof for it that neither Robin Williamson nor Michael Heron would agree with the rejectionist near-cant of this anti-Seeger business, though surprise is a constant in the backstage world, and it may well be that only me and Arlo Guthrie and Don McLean would enter the ranks in defense of what is after all an 87 year old man who’s done a lot more good in the world, if good can be measured in the short run, than most of the rest of us have or will.
Dylan finally got to me in or about 2001 or so, when I first and last heard him live. Of course I’d heard a fair amount of his popular material and some less so for years, but never had a clue why it exerted fascination. Kept thinking yes there’s magic here but what is its nature?
Hearing him live blew me away. Hearing him do his old songs folded back in radical analytical translation. Hearing him do his new stuff with vocal touches stretching from Satchmo to Sinatra, somehow spectruming this immediate single performance into a history of music and musical performance with nothing of the tattered air of curatorial respect.
Something I didn’t know was possible. Voices in the voice - not in the sound, but in the phrasing, style. It is not a put-down of Seeger or anyone to say this is something else altogether.
And Bruce Springsteen.
Well, Roy, I’ll grant you Mr. Rpgers. I was mostly interested in Seeger anyway. If you notice, I have lined out a bit of my earlier description of him. Here’s the thing: Mr. Rogers spoke to kids & spoke appropriately to them; Seeger, on the other hand, spoke & sang to adults as if they were children. His tone carries a moral certainty that Dylan’s never does. And what Dylan got right was what he called “folk song logic” in his recent memoir, Chronicles. A linguist would call it folk song grammar, but in any case, what Dylan got was a set of mythic structures that he then put to his own use rather than enshrining them as either political or aesthetic objects. I put on Blood on the Tracks yesterday, since you had mentioned it. To me, it represents the culmination of that “logic” Dylan had absorbed. “Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts” is a perfect postmodern ballad. “She was with Big Jim, but she was leaning toward the Jack of Hearts.” Indeed.
When you listen to Seeger, you’re getting something like W.C. Handy’s blues, a reproduction designed for saleability. Now, since I defended Handy’s blues in my original post, I’ll have to grant Seeger a kind of legitimacy, but I’m farther away in time & tradition from Handy than I am from Dylan, so I don’t take him as personally. Really, listen to Seeger’s early recording of “John Henry” after listening to Woody’s version or Bill Broonzy’s. Still, when Seeger is playing Banjo with Bruce Springsteen’s band on their version of “John Henry,” he manages for a few minutes to loosen up a bit.
Agree with you entirely about Farina. Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me is at once brilliant & utterly self-absorbed. It’s a shame Farina didn’t get a chance to surpass his own adolescence. For a guy who died at 25, he left an awful lot of good work behind.
I was just thinking of the Incredible String Band yesterday, in the context of listening to a few snippets of Joanna Newsom on Amazon. Even someone as mainstream as Judy Collins (whose voice & manner I much prefer to Joan Baez) was influenced by them & covered at least one of their songs — “First [Girl] Boy I Loved.” I suppose one needs to mention Richard Thompson in this context as well & Fairport Convention’s recording of “Little Matty Groves,” if nothing else.
Here’s a view on Modern Times from someone who HAS spent some time listening to it. This disc doesn’t have the feel of a studio-built project. It’s his road band and they are playing . . . together.
-”Thunder” has an infectious beat and those four Denny Freeman guitar solos - each similarly themed, but with increasing intensity. (I assume this is Denny here, but it is eye-opening to see Bob with electric guitar, in concert going toe-to-to with this great player.)
-”Spirit” is relaxing in a country swing manner with catchy chord changes and that repeating rift mirroring guitar and piano. Then Bob comes in with a nice, unBob-like harp.
-He puts his own lyrics to an ass-kickin’ “Rollin’ and Tumblin” and sticks in Elmore James slide guitar for good measure.
-The album’s theme of alternating up/down tempo starts to show with “Deal Goes Down”. Nice little short guitar fills, each quite different.
-”Someday Baby” is grabbing something from Maggi’s Farm.
-His “Workingman’s Blues” narrative sends a nod to the great Merle Haggard who he recently toured with for several months.
-”Beyond The Horizon” won’t shake the world. It’s a pleasant little love song with day-dreaming imagery underlined by that Hawaiian style pedal steel.
-Modern times intrude here with the river on the rise / coming to grips with fate in “Nettie Moore”. Dark, Southern with a spare arrangement pushed by that insistent marching beat.
- “The Levee’s Gonna Break” speeds up “Thunder On The Mountain” with the four guitar solo’s again.
-Droning violin accents the dark, gloomy “Ain’t Talkin”. All accoustic, nice guitar work. The album wraps up with “Ain’ Talkin’, Just Walkin’. Up the road, around the bend. Heart burnin’, still yearnin’, In the last outback at the world’s end.”
I’ll leave it to somebody else to analyze this word-for-word. I just like the music.
8.0, thanks for the track-by-track rundown. I didn’t say that I didn’t like Modern Times, just that I hadn’t found my way into it. Your comments will help when I put it on for a good listen this afternoon. Thanks.