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watusichris · 4 years

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At the Black Horse Tavern on Armageddon Street

I said the soul of a nation been torn away…

In the Miracle Mile, the morning overcast locally known as “June gloom” feels deeper this year; the very air seems gray. I only escape the lockdown when I shop for groceries, in the hours the supermarket is open early for older customers. I do not drive, and, with public transportation out of the question, I am pinioned at home. Just to avoid atrophying completely, I flee my apartment for a masked walk of at least a mile every day, usually before sundown. If I walk up Wilshire, I pass dozens of empty office buildings and vacant storefronts; even restaurants with WE’RE OPEN signs in their windows are dark. It’s like something out of the 1959 atomic apocalypse movie On the Beach. The neighborhood seems almost entirely populated by the homeless who occupy the sidewalks along the boulevard. Some have been here for years. They have their spots staked out, and if they disappear you fear that something has happened to them. At night, the 8 p.m. hoots and cheers for essential workers have now died down. Distant fireworks, what sounds like gunfire, and sirens (from engines housed at the nearby fire station and squad cars from the Wilshire Division) are heard constantly. Police helicopters have always hovered every evening – Loudon Wainwright III, who used to live in the Mile, wrote a song about them, “Here Come the Choppers,” naming some local landmarks. Now they drop lower, so low that at times I fear one will land atop my building. In late May, after the Black Lives Matter protests sparked large demonstrations in my neighborhood and attendant nearby crimes committed by apolitical opportunists, I looked out my living room window and watched a looter drop out of a window at the Walgreens a block away.

It was into this vortex of disease, poverty, discord, and dread that Bob Dylan’s first album of new songs in eight years, Rough and Rowdy Ways, fell like some kind of miracle, on Juneteenth 2020.

The record was prefaced by a fanfare. On March 27, at the stroke of midnight in the East, an e-mail from Dylan’s publicist landed in my mailbox, containing a link to a new song, “Murder Most Foul,” a nearly 17-minute opus that used the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy as a springboard.

Now, even without its personal associations, this unexpected materialization would have been momentous. But the song pierced me to the heart, for on the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, my mother gave me The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the first record of his I ever owned; she had bought it as a Christmas present, but she thought it would console me, and she put it in my hands early. My mind reeling back, I listened to the new song, about Kennedy and the swell of American history and music, over and over on the night I received it. It manifested as another gift.

Two more songs, “I Contain Multitudes” and “False Prophet,” served as preludes to the arrival of the new full-length, which finally ended Dylan’s 2015-17 cycle of interpretations from the Frank Sinatra catalog of standards at a staggering five LPs worth. But the new record did not mark a definitive break with the sound and style of Shadows in the Night, Fallen Angels, and Triplicate.

Though a couple of the new tunes out of the 10 tracks rock in Dylan’s laid-back latter-day manner, the approach is largely subdued. The instruments are close-mic’ed, the atmosphere is tactile, the playing (largely by Dylan’s road band, with ringers like Fiona Apple, Blake Mills, Alan Pasqua, and Benmont Tench) is hushed and soft-focus. Only the addition of humming choral vocals on a couple of songs seems a new wrinkle.

The first time I listened to Rough and Rowdy Ways, I landed, hard, on one of those latter tracks, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” Introduced by the vocal choir-of-sorts, it is a ballad sporting some of Dylan’s most poignant singing. The Never Ending Tour has left his voice mangled, still, but he stretches as far as he can into his upper register here, his rhythmic sense sure as ever, offering a declaration of devotion and humility of surprising beauty. The first time I listened to it, tears leaped into my eyes.

The more I listened to the album, the more I wondered if that song was about a woman or about God. There are more references, direct and indirect, to religion on this record than there have been on any since the ones Dylan made during his born-again conversion of the ‘70s. Usually they play in the background. The only song to foreground the subject, “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” plays the topic for comedy, and its denial of secular music has to be taken as tongue-in-cheek – the song rides a Reed-style shuffle that tips its hat, and hand, to the bluesman’s hit songs of the ‘50s and ‘60s. (The album’s other overt rocker, “False Prophet,” drinks from the same well: As many early auditors noted, the song is purloined from “If Loving is Believing,” an obscure Sun Records B-side by Billy the Kid Emerson.)

Questions of the soul crop up along the road; in “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan muses that Kennedy’s soul couldn’t be found during his autopsy. These glancing queries really come as no surprise, coming as they do from a 79-year-old musician who is no doubt weighing his own narrowing future and the transport of his own soul. While one can’t truly say that Rough and Rowdy Ways has an air of finality to it, it certainly reflects a reckoning with the past, at times in spades.

History is repeatedly pulled into the present here. Dylan gave his game away from the first with “Murder Most Foul,” which was animated by a cascade of allusion, literary and musical references, and brainy in-jokes. (The album is broadly funny at times, most brazenly on “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and on “My Own Version of You,” a left-handed jape in which the singer takes the role of Victor Frankenstein.) “Mother of Muses” plays with antiquities: Using an invocation straight out of Homer, Dylan professes his love for Calliope, the Greek muse of epic poetry, perhaps admitting himself into a pantheon occupied by Whitman (celebrated in “I Contain Multitudes”), Blake, Ginsberg, and Corso, who are also namechecked on the record. “What would Julius Caesar do,” he asks at one juncture, and answers with “Crossing the Rubicon,” which drolly translates Caesar’s military boldness in internal, personal terms. “Key West” is a geographic reverie that touches lightly on events from the songwriter’s teenage years, and makes an unlikely reference to Harry S. Truman’s Little White House. Doctors of Dylanology will be kept busy by this pile-up of history for years.

The violence of history lurks everywhere on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Usually it is stated as a threat – Dylan walks heavily armed, threatening to hack off a limb if he’s challenged. That violence is of course completely overt on “Murder Most Foul,” the alpha and omega of the record: The song was the first to see release, like an exclamation, and it takes pride of place on the album, set off by itself on a disc of its own.

Part conspiracy theory, part thriller, an eruption of cultural confluences, “Murder Most Foul” would be a baffling, thrilling, and all-embracing opus no matter when it was released. But, though it appears to take a long view of a historic occurrence that shook its then 22-year-old author’s life and heart, it holds a greater, contemporary resonance. Recorded in early 2020, unleashed into the world amid great darkness in the fourth year of another American president’s monstrous, conscienceless rule, that remarkable song – about law, crime, the republic, and what Dylan calls “the age of the Antichrist” – carried resonances that were hidden, and felt more than stated. It is the jewel of a deep, knowing work that is only beginning to reveal its most profound meanings, and one that offers succor to its listeners, we who daily claw our way toward the light. “It’s darkest before the dawn,” Dylan sings on “Crossing the Rubicon,” and then he adds, sotto voce, “(oh God).” In that telling moment lies his truest prayer.

(photo: Miracle Mile/Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, June 18, 2020)

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ulfwolf · 5 years

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The Art of Dying

Bob Dylan

In the spring of 1965, a friend of a friend (whom I didn’t much care for, to be honest, and whose name I certainly don’t remember) introduced me to Bob Dylan. My connection with the then folk singer (an epithet Dylan always professed to hate, at least later on) was more or less instant.

How did the subject of Dylan even come up?

We must have been discussing pop or rock or however we thought of the Beatles or the Searchers or the Stones or the Zombies or Dave Clark Five or the Hollies, or, or, or at the time, probably hanging out by the boathouses flanking the canal that ran through our little town linking the Baltic Bay with a small inland lake, which we called a bay (Big Bay and Little Bay—sounds like an H.C. Andersen Fairy Tale). These boathouses were where the in-name-only in-crowd used to hang out of an evening to smoke cigarettes and eat ice cream and shoot the breeze as it were.

Now, I was quite knowledgeable on the subject of pop or rock since not only did I love the music—I’d go so far to say that music was what I lived for at the time—but I was also writing a weekly music column for a local paper which meant that I, on a weekly basis, competed with some equally pop-loving (though not as cool as I, obviously) classmates for the few copies of New Musical Express that every Tuesday morning would hit the only news kiosk in town (Pressbyrån by the railway station) that carried foreign papers. I needed NME (or, if worse, alas, had come to worse, Melody Marker, or in times of utter desperation, Fabulous) and its wealth of up-to-date info about our musical heroes not only to write good articles, but also to maintain my status as my peers’ go-to guy for the latest and final word on the music scene—yes, information was certainly power, and I reveled in the status of it. NME was my secret weapon.

Now, unbeknownst to me, this friend of a friend whose name I refuse to recall must at some point have asked me what I thought about Bob Dylan and I must have looked at him: huh? unwittingly betraying my ignorance (and how had I missed Dylan, I have now idea—he must have been covered in these music papers by then, and at some length). Oh, man, this friend of a friend probably said, you have to listen to this guy, and I said sure, love to, and shortly thereafter (nothing was very far from anywhere else in my town) we were at his place (I seem to remember where he lived, which is odd) listening to “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and as I said, for some strange reason (he was nothing like my British pop bands, obviously) the connection was instant.

Even today, I could not tell you what it was, precisely, but I believe that some portion of his incredible appeal for me was that “Hey, I could do that.” It wouldn’t take a band and drums and electric guitars. Just an acoustic guitar and me, that’s all. I had a good voice, loved to sing, was in the school choir and all that, and Dylan’s songs were simple, three or four chords at most—a lot of words though.

The other thing that must have appealed, carried important currency, was that if I had not heard of Dylan, then nor had the vast majority of the kids in town (this nameless friend of a friend obviously the exception) so there was a lot of with-it status to be gained in knowing and digging (weird word that, striking a chord somewhere between liking and understanding) this oddly looking and weirdly sounding American and his long, nasal songs.

To be honest, my English was not stellar, but as far as rudimentary went, I did grasp the gist of most of Dylan’s lyrics and here, in my mind, was also someone who spoke for me—or “us” (the poor, misunderstood (hence mistreated and unappreciated) youth of the civilized world)—and who pulled no punches about the true lay of the land (think “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” et al.). From there on I took to Dylan more than I had ever taken to the Beatles, and that is saying a lot.

At that time, I used to cart around a gray and silver Phillips reel-to-reel (mono) tape recorder (weighed a ton) and this friend of a friend, since I asked so nicely, was okay with me recording his Dylan records. Stay right there, be right back—with the Phillips. I think he had four or possibly five Dylan albums at this time, so his patience did begin to ebb toward the end of his Dylan collection. Once they were all in my can, as I recall, I did have all extant Dylan recordings at the time (this was prior to “Highway 61 Revisited” which was released in August of that year), and for the next several months, this was all I ever listened to, period.

In fact, as I moved down to Stockholm that summer, I brought the reel-to-reel with me and I played nothing but Dylan for the people I met, very few of whom, just like in my home town, had heard of him. This, of course, made me quite hip (or crazy) and I reveled in this notoriety. In fact, I think it fair to say that notoriety comprised the bulk of sustenance at the time.

Once I was settled in Stockholm, I eventually bought all of Dylan’s albums, all the way up to and including “Nashville Skyline” (which I didn’t really like all that much) while I managed to miss Dylan’s April 29, 1966 Stockholm concert, but that’s another story.

I also learned how to play and sing most of his acoustic-only songs, which included remembering tons of lyrics. I sang these a lot, both to myself (both as practice and for the sheer enjoyment of it) and others (who were always very appreciative and sometimes even admiring—valuable stuff that).

Later, after leaving Stockholm, I did buy “Self Portrait” when it came out, and eventually I also heard “New Morning”, but neither of these impressed much, and by 1970 I had pretty much grown out of this my hero.

Dylan, to be honest, never regained his hero status with me. My worship period truly ended with “Blonde on Blonde” although “John Wesley Harding” was mystically cool, though not in any recognizable Dylanesque way.

Still, it would be fair to say, and absolutely no lie, that Bob Dylan grew to be an integral part of me during the late 1960s and in some way has stayed with me ever since.

Today I have his first eleven studio recordings—up through “New Morning”—this time around on mp3. I still listen to all of them every now and then.

Back to: Intro :: Clever Boy

#Music #Fandom #Bob Dylan #Finding Feet

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