Bob Dylan
49 years listening . . .
Someone somewhere has ventured to call Bob Dylan the best
musician ever.
The site is
everybobdylansong.blogspot.com, and the subtitle for the site is
SPORADIC MUSINGS ON THE GREATEST MUSICIAN EVER. YES, EVER. I like
that. It emboldens me to take up the question, Could there ever
be a “greatest musician,” getting help from Kierkegaard on that.
And I could consider how the greatest musician ever could be doing so
poorly in concerts, of late, on his unofficial “never ending tour,”
which even his die-hard fans think should perhaps end about now.
And there is the problem of his last album, so far, Tempest, which has
its strengths but would not earn him that Best Musician title.
These last questions will appear below in the last two essays below.
Almost two centuries ago the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, the best
writer in philosophy (some will allow), attended a performance of
Mozart’s Don Juan. Don Giovanni it would have been in
German. Then he went home and listened to it a dozen times
on his CD player . . . didn’t he wish! I picture him in his large open
room with tables all around its perimeter, his little library of future
books abrew at all those tables, and then he came home from the concert
and put it in writing why this was the greatest work of art in world
history. In essence, he said that since music and drama were two
of the greatest art forms, their combination in opera would have to be
the greatest art form. And since Mozart was the greatest
composer, and this his best opera, well, then this is the greatest work
of art.
You can read 42 pages on this topic here (http://www3.dbu.edu/naugle/pdf/kierkegaard_dongiovanni.pdf)
. . . which is wonderful, since 42 is the best of all
numbers. More on that elsewhere. Bear in mind only that not
long ago there was 6 by 7 matrix that was all Dylan’s albums. And
Kierkegaard died at 42, as did Elvis Presley, Gilda Radner, RFK, and
Ted Bundy. I was 42 when I began grad school and learned this
about Kierkegaard, who left us 30 volumes of his work, so I thought,
where have I been up til now? But I was assured that philosophers
reach their peak at 80. He wrote his dozen books in his last 12
years, so I have some time left—even now, a quarter century gone by—to
figure out if Dylan is the world’s greatest musician.
This entire situation began to evoke deep and profound questions: Is there
anyway possible to integrate human love with a religious conception of reality? Can
spirituality and sensuality in any way be reconciled? Can freedom be achieved only by
a flight from this world, and by a rigorous detachment from the passions of the flesh, the
world, and the self?27
With this kind of problem, best to circle around for a while . . .
DYLAN’S TOP TEN SONGS
(with links gradually appearing to explain)
Gotta Serve Somebody
Mr. Tambourine Man / Like a Rolling Stone
Hurricane
Brownsville Girl
Forever Young
Visions of Johanna
Bob Dylan’s Dream
Idiot Wind
Man of Peace
Essays
You and You: an Open Letter to Bob Dylan 1997
Aestheticism and Faith: the Bob Dylan Case (academic treatment of the problem)
You and You Only: the Open Letter Revisited (not written yet)
Bob Dylan’s Last Song(s) (2010, 2014)
Bob Dylan’s Last Song(s)
(published in 2010 in the New Mexico Breeze, revised 2014)
In May of 1997, Bob Dylan turned 56 and nearly died from an
attack of histoplasmosis. He recovered, and in September he
released the first studio album of new material in nearly a
decade. Had he not recovered, Time Out of Mind, already in the
can in May, would have given us a clearly designated “last song” from
Bob Dylan. It would have been “Highlands,” with the refrain,
borrowed from poet Robert Burns, “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”
This would have been a comfort to those who paid attention to his
Christian conversion 20 years before and rejoiced with him in three
Christian albums, but then wondered, “What Happened?” The book by
that title, by the way, is about Dylan’s sudden turn into Christianity
and suggested hopefully that it might be temporary. But
Christians were glad and have long been asking if he was really born
again and why it seems not to have lasted.
In Slow Train Coming (1979) Dylan ventured into Christianity, and in
Saved (1980) he declared it unequivocally. Shot of Love
(1981) expressed the struggle of the Christian life, but three
albums in three years said Bob Dylan was a Believer. Then
Infidels (1983) threw the Christians a curve, with its hauntingly
beautiful doubts and second thoughts. “I and I” you could take in
a Chinese way, as “change and change”: the man who cannot be pinned
down cannot pin down his experience of the gospel. Or you could
take it as deconstructing Martin Buber’s I and Thou. He
sings, “I and I, in creation where one’s nature neither honors nor
forgives/ I and I, one says to the other no man sees my face and
lives.” His I-and-Thou experience has been changed to I-and-I,
self-and-self, with no real transcendence in the glimpsed joy that has
left him now. He also sings “Don’t Fall Apart on Me
Tonight,” putting his loss of faith in his favorite metaphor of the
failed love affair.
“Trust Yourself,” in Empire Burlesque (1985), is about as
post-Christian as a song could be, and throughout the album Dylan
explains in painful detail the falling away of his Christian
experience. Those who ignored or wished away Dylan’s conversion
won’t understand this album. The opener, “Tight Connection to My
Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?)” has two titles because the female
chorus assures him of the tight connection, his security in God, but he
has lost the love he was enjoying, and declares that Christianity no
longer works for him. He sings, “You’re the one I’ve been
looking for, you’re the one that’s got the key, but I can’t figure out
whether I’m too good for you, or you’re too good for me.” Did he
fail to live up to Christianity, or did it fail to live up to his
scrutiny? In any case, he said he was all right “‘Til I Fell in
Love with You,” but then, “I ain’t never gonna be the same again,” and
“I can’t unring the bell.”
In Shot of Love, where the doubts began, he sings the raucous and
mysterious “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” and one theory
with Dylan is that he still believes, but 20th century American
Christianity is a runaway bride, something he cannot publicly
embrace. But more deeply imbedded in all his work is the elusive
female Muse, the woman with whom he never could work it out, who
appeared in his very first recorded song and never went away, except by
constantly going away. Her many appearances were for him “Girls
like birds, flying away.” She takes on a special depth with his joyous
Christian period and her loss strikes a tragic chord across the rest of
his work.
Dylan grew quiet and largely sang the blues of other artists during the
eighties and nineties. Oh Mercy in 1988 showed the fruit of his
conversion, and even a repentance from his trademark non-involvement,
as in “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” He had reveled in his cocky evasiveness, but
in Oh Mercy he had to ask, “What Good am I?”—if I can’t respond to her
needs? His long complaint about lost love was there, too,
and he asked, “What Was it you Wanted?” He said he was
doing very well, thank you, without her . . . “Most of the Time.”
He even offered a theological explanation with his shadowy “Man with
the Long Black Coat,” Guilt Himself, who stole away his joy.
What burst forth full force in Time out of Mind was that Christianity
had, like the loveliest of women, taken him for a ride and dropped him
off. “You left me standing in the doorway, crying.” There
is no recovery of his Christian proclamation, just his witness that
what he glimpsed was so great it spoiled everything else. For
those who have ears to hear it is plain that God is in these
songs. In “Cold Irons Bound” he says, “It is you and you only
I’ve been singing about.”
Near the end of that possible last song, “Highlands,” Dylan says, “The
party’s over and there’s less and less to say/ I got new eyes/
Everything looks far away.” The heart of “Highlands” is in a
desultory encounter with a waitress who wants him to paint her
picture. He keeps making excuses, she keeps giving him what he
needs, and then he slips away, and the tone of resignation and
emptiness makes us want to scream at him and tell him to Respond!
Despite his repentance in Oh Mercy from insouciant non-involvement, it
has him firmly in his grip. So, if we have to, we can give up on
him, accept his resignation, and take comfort when he says, “Well my
heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam/ That’s where I’ll be when I
get called home.” His last words could then have been, “I’m already
there in my mind, and that’s good enough for me.”
Of course Dylan did not die in 1997. Four years later, on the
second Tuesday of September in 2001, he released another studio album,
Love and Theft. One could imagine that he went to Columbia
Records that morning and then traveled a few miles across Manhattan to
see some high-powered associate and was dematerialized in the World
Trade Center. That would have made the album historic from the
start. If it were his last, we could say that he retreated into
the world of professional musicianship, kept his messages muted and
low, and said little about Jesus or God. If that had been his
last album, I would have preferred it close with the penultimate song,
“Cry a While.” He sang all those songs for all those years to
make us feel the pain of our unknown sins and the hurts of our
neighbors, but his sensitivity did not sink in, so now he is gone, and
it is our turn to “cry a while.” But the real last song is
“Sugar Baby,” which ends like this:
Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one
You got a way of tearing the world apart. Love, see what you done
Just as sure as we’re living, just as sure as you’re born
Look up, look up—seek your Maker—’fore Gabriel blows his horn
Sugar Baby, get on down the line
You ain’t got no sense, no how
You went years without me
Might as well keep going now
Here is Dylan’s oft-lost Love once again, whatever we call her.
She is Pleasure herself, or Happiness, his “Shelter from the
Storm.” She is Joanna of his visions, “Brownsville Girl,” or the
“Girl from the North Country.” “She Belongs to Me,” he says
ironically, but when you pursue her you end up “looking through her
keyhole down upon your knees.” Or she is the Christian Muse, the
joy of the gospel. Carnal or heavenly, She is everything
beautiful Dylan ever tried to grasp, but she slipped away.
Dylan lived on, I am happy to say, and in 2006 released Modern
Times. A comforting ending would be “I’ll Be with You when the
Deal Goes Down,” But the song that could have been his last
studio release is “Ain’t Talking.” So do you want to know about
Bob’s foray into Messianic belief? He seems inclined not to tell
us.
He is “up the road around the bend,” not talking, just walking, but
with “heart burnin’, still yearnin’.” “Yearnin’” would have been
a good word on which to end his career, although the actual phrase he
might have left us with is, “In the last outback, at the world’s
end.” Ending with “end,” around the bend, way down
under . . . a fitting last meal for his hungry fans.
The discography of late Dylan gets messy, with new and old material and
some of it looking into the abyss with respect to musical
quality. Together Through Life (2009) starts with “Beyond Here
Lies Nothin’,” which is not what we want to hear, and ends with “It’s
All Good,” which I find unconvincing. Some people on BobDylan.com
liked this one, but I sided with the person who wrote, “Give him his
five stars if you must. Me, I prefer to hold Bob's feet a little
closer to the fire. Blessings to you Bob. Glad you had a good time
jammin' with the boys in Malibu. Hope you had a merry little Christmas.
Now, it's magnum opus time.”
Now it is 2014, and in 2012 we got one more studio release,
Tempest. The critics spoke well of it and loved its
“darkness.” It ends with a pretty song honoring John Lennon, so
at this point Dylan’s last word is, “Shine your light, move it on, you
burn so bright, roll on John.”
Elsewhere in the album Dylan drops his disappointed-theist hints:
“Narrow Way” says over and over, “If I can’t work up to you, you’ll
surely have to work down to me someday.” And “Pay in Blood”
says, “I pay in blood, but not my own.” The title song, a
long and disjointed account of the Titanic tragedy, ends with, “The
watchman he lay dreaming/Of all the things that can be/He dreamed the
Titanic was sinking/Into the deep blue sea.” Odd that he shrinks
the whole grim narrative into the dream of the watchmen—then, as that
watchmen, drops the best of human hopes into the deep blue
sea.
If there must be a last song among what we have today, I choose “I’m
Not There,” from the 2008 film by that name. Six people play
Dylan in this fanciful illustration of his evanescent identity. The
song is raised up from long-ago Basement Tapes, and LAWeekly.com calls
it “Bob Dylan’s Most Mysterious Recording.” In the movie the song
starts in a noisy crowd scene, and in the audio it sounds like someone
dropped the stylus onto the vinyl fairly near the edge. You run
with it, trying to get the sense of it, and it never comes together,
but you want it to—like Dylan wanted Life to come together.
People say Dylan can’t sing, but only a few recordings are mushy, and
many are enunciated with astounding power. The lyrics often take
you far afield and have you wondering what he is talking about, but
somehow the title line will reappear and draw it together again.
But “I’m Not There” is unique. It does for me musically
what life seems to have done for Dylan: it draws me with its simple,
compelling melody, and I glimpse again the tortured Muse of his long
travail, his “Christ-forsaken angel” (or “Prize-forsaken,” some
think). But while other songs are puzzling or obscure, this one
is shot through with holes; it is “breaking up” like a cell phone,
fractured. This is hard to describe: it does not break up phonically,
like a mike with a bad connection, nor distort itself like an analog
radio signal. But it tears itself apart syllable by syllable,
like bursts of dyslexia, and yet he speaks clearly, too.
Dylan clearly says “When I’m there, she’s okay, but she’s not
when I’m gone.” He knows his aestheticist detachment kills his
once-glimpsed, only- satisfying Beauty. In the movie during
this song we see Heath Ledger as Dylan with his kids in the car in the
driveway saying goodbye to his tender-faced wife, who is handing him
their completed divorce papers. “I was born to love her, “ he
sings, “But she knows that the kingdom waits so high above her.”
And I’m crying out for a full grasp of this song, like Dylan reached
out for the utter consummation of his aesthetic and spiritual
journey. About the last thing he has said to us, so far, may have
been, “It's all about confusion and I cry for her.” His final
words, if this were the song . . . “I’m gone.”
If that is too negative, and if Tempest leaves us hanging, then we can
let his last work be his Christmas album, and his last recorded song “O
Little Town of Bethlehem.” Or we can wait for his magnum
opus.
Setlist
Denver, Colorado Bellco Theatre November 1, 2014
adapted from http://www.boblinks.com/110114s.html
1. Things Have Changed (Bob center
stage)
FILM - Wonder Boys
2. She Belongs To Me (Bob center stage with harp) Bringing it all Back Home
3. Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (Bob on
piano) Together
Through Life
4. Workingman's Blues #2 (Bob center
stage)
Modern Times
5. Waiting For You (Bob on
piano)
CONCERTS ONLY
6. Duquesne Whistle (Bob on piano)
Tempest
7. Pay In Blood (Bob center stage)
Tempest
8. Tangled Up In Blue (Bob center stage with harp then on piano) Blood On the Tracks
9. Love Sick (Bob center stage)
Time Out of
Mind
(Intermission)
10. High Water (For Charley Patton) (Bob center stage) Love and Theft
11. Simple Twist Of Fate (Bob center stage with harp) Blood on the Tracks
12. Early Roman Kings (Bob on
piano)
Tempest
13. Forgetful Heart (Bob center stage with
harp)
Together Through Life
14. Spirit On The Water (Bob on
piano)
Modern
Times
15. Scarlet Town (Bob center stage)
Tempest
16. Soon After Midnight (Bob on
piano)
Tempest
17. Long And Wasted Years (Bob center
stage)
Tempest
(encore)
18. Blowin' In The Wind (Bob on
piano)
The
Free-Wheeling Bob Dylan
19. Stay With Me
COVER
(song by Jerome Moross and Carolyn Leigh) (Bob on piano)(FILM: “The Cardinal”)
**********
My Ticketmaster Review
Can Dylan sing? Many say no, but that is because they see him
only on TV and in concerts, where he does not usually sing well, not in
recent decades, anyway. If you hear the studio recordings, and if
you give them time—because he is an acquired taste—you learn that the
greatest musician of our times is also a great singer. His own
work he sings like almost no else ever could. But in concert, in
Denver, in 2014, it was a little rough. Band was loud, his mike a
little high, and then he flattens his well-known melodies and adds
useless ups and down at the end of the song. Also, but not so
much in Denver this time, he shouts out phrases you expect him to
sing. This was an appreciative crowd, hoping for the best, and
they cheered when they figured out what song he was singing.
But the concert was 2/3 late Dylan, the last few albums, including two
from Together through Life, which I refuse to call a studio
album. Six were from Tempest, which though serious, is not quite
Dylan caliber. You wonder if his creative mind is tired, like his
voice. His last words in the main set were, “So much for these
long and wasted years.” But it all ended well with a second encore that
was a cover of “Stay with Me,” which Frank Sinatra made the theme song
of a 1965 movie called “The Cardinal.” I don’t know the movie,
but the song is a very definite crying out to God.
So this is what the concert said: this life on Earth is going nowhere
and is one big disappointment after another, so I need to get back to
the God who once made me happy.” To understand that, go back to
Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love, and then, in the powerful
post-Christian era, Infidels and Empire Burlesque. Add a few
touches from Oh, Mercy, the fact that he sang the blues all through the
nineties, and then, as the grand conclusion of his struggle, the
magnificent Time out of Mind. In that album, look for “Cold
Irons Bound,” where Dylan says, “It’s you, and you only, I’ve been
singing about.”
The rest of his albums only hint that he is still a struggling
Messianic Jew. The two songs on Tempest that show this, “Narrow
Way” and “Pay in Blood,” he chose not to sing.
**********
Jerry L Sherman
Albuquerque
11 NOV 2014
http://richstone.org/aesfaith.htm