So I’m listening to No Direction Home, which is a 2 CD set of live recordings and alt takes released to accompany one or another of the recent dylan retrospectives (or maybe they’re all the same film).
Anyway, this set has a lot of tracks from the period in the mid sisties when dylan held lightening in his pocket and the zeitgeist in the palm of his hand. I’m listening to tracks from Highway 61 Revisited, which is my pick for the greatest album in rock and roll. These are songs I know WELL; I’m not a Dylan geek, but I’ve listened to this record and these songs thousands of times.
And I’m still astounded at Dylan’s extraordinary fertility; I can hear him dropping alternate words, phrases and lines in on the fly, just because he’s bored. They all scan and rhyme and each changes the song. It reminds me how arbitrary the ‘final’ words were, merely because these were the words he decided to throw in when singing what became the final take. Other lines are absolutely static, and never change from version to version.
The other thing I marvel at is Dylan’s incredible grasp of metre. I heard a jazz guy once observe that Bob Dylan is Frank Sinatra’s real heir, when it comes to playing on and off the beat to maximise the emotional weight of a line. It’s this, sometimes, which makes his occassionally banal or nonsensical words seem like poetry.
Like a lot of folk, I gave up listening to the later Dylan, but this era and Hwy 61 in particular are the work of genius.
Yep. I was thinking just the same thing, listening to that new set. He was on a remarkable roll; he just couldn’t stop himself. I think (and I know this is hardly an original thought, especially if you watched Allen Ginsberg in the documentary tonight or if you read around in the Ginsberg bios and elsewhere) that a lot of that inventive freedom happened when Dylan fed the Beat influence into the mix of Guthrie and trad he’d been working so effectively. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is just about a perfect Beat poem, and the verbal invention (improvised or otherwise) is something out of the Beat/bop aesthetic. And the mood and the surreal cultural name-dropping of “Desolation Row.” As somebody suggested in the show tonight, he could really pull things together.
It pleased me to learn that Ginsberg composed “Wichita Vortex Sutra” on the road by talking it into a tape recorder that was a gift from Dylan.
I think Highway 61 Revisited could be the best album of all time merely because it has both Like A Rolling Stone and Desolation Row on it. I still get chills when I hear the verse about Ophelia:
Now Ophelia, she’s 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession’s her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah’s great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row
I also watched the the first two hour segment of the documentary on Bob Dylan this evening. It brought back so many memories of my younger years when I was singing folk songs in coffee houses in the early sixties. The main difference between Dylan and myself is that, while I did have some talent, I wasn’t a genius. I was content to mimic what I had heard others do. We both shared a love for the songs of Woody Guthrie, however.
Thousands of folk back East they say,
Are leaving home most every day,
And they’re beating the hot ol’ dusty way
To the California line.
Cross the desert sands they roll,
Just a-getting out of the old Dust Bowl,
They think they’re going to a sugar bowl,
But here’s what they find.
Well, the police at the port of entry say,
“Your number fourteen thousand for today.”
If you ain’t got the do-re-me, boys,
If you ain’t got the do-re-me,
You’d better go back to beautiful Texas,
Oklahoma, Georgia, Kansas, Tennessee.
California’s a garden of Eden.
It’s a paradise to live in or see,
But, believe it or not,
You won’t find it so hot,
If you don’t have the do-re-me.
I sure hope to see some of these Dylan retrospectives come out on DVD; I’ve managed to miss them at every turn and I think I’d really enjoy seeing them.
I had some of the “rap-listening” kids of mine listen to some Dylan to dig his slant on “rapping”. Now I don’t really like Rap, but the best of it is a creative, word sound, rhythmic thing which I can respect.
I had the kids listen to “maggie comes fleet foot face full of black soot talking bout the heat put plants in the bed but”. Yeah it was a real cross cultural/generational thing.
cool
The Scorsese documentary “No Way Home” is now out on DVD (saw it at Blockbuster but they were all out).
One of the most incredible things I ever heard was Dylan and Johnny Cash singing a duet. When you consider that neither of them could sing their way out of a wet paper bag, you might wonder whatever got into them to mix their voices together - truly an awful sound.
I’m not a Dylan geek either, although I do own 1 Dylan CD. I watched episode 1 last night and enjoyed it. I also liked that it did not have a narrator–just Dylan and guest commentators. It was an interesting way to tell the story.
One thing that I do notice is that everyone seems to like his old stuff, as do I. However, I rarely see anything written about his music from the past 20 years or so. Is it any good, or is he always overshadowed by the genius of his work from the 60s/70s?
I dunno–I’ve never really given it a good chance; I stopped listening to the new records somewhere around Desire. From what I’ve heard, he still has his fluid command of the words–one song I listened to briefly had him rhyming internally three time a line, and still making (some) sense. That’s not so difficult in scots or italian where the vowels or more homogenous, but it’s enormously difficult in english.
However, no man can be a God forever. Dylan was the man of his time, and his time moved on, I think.
I agree that Dylan had/has a “unique” voice. But I always liked Johnny Cash’s deep, southern voice. I also like Dylan’s voice, but I never considered Cash and Dylan to be in the same vocal boat, so to speak. But then maybe that’s because I have a tin ear.
