Bob Dylan (41 page)

You leave. This isn’t folk music, not as Mark Spoelstra or Tommy Makem or Joan Baez or Pete Seeger or Martin Carthy make folk music. This is not a gesture. This is not respect. This is not for good or evil. You realize you have the rest of your life to catch up. After all, somewhere, some time, he’ll stumble.

 

Bob Dylan,
Live 1961-2000—Thirty-nine Years of Great Concert Performances
(SME, 2001).

 

———.
Live at the Gaslight 1962
(Columbia Legacy, 2005). Includes “The Cuckoo,” “Cocaine,” “West Texas,” and “Handsome Molly.” Notes by Sean Wilentz.

 

———. “No More Auction Block,” on
the bootleg series volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991
(Columbia, 1991).

 

———.
Second Gaslight Tape
(Wild Wolf bootleg). Includes “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos.”

16 July 2001

 

2) Clarence Ashley:
Greenback Dollar—The Music of Clarence Ashley, 1928-1933
(County). Ashley (1895-1967) was one of the greatest of the old-timey singers—those who, in the first third of the twentieth century, sang as if the new century was a trick that would disappear soon enough, as if only songs made long before you were born could hold your interest for more than a season. He was born Clarence and recorded under that name, but everyone knew him as Tom; when the bottom fell out of the old-timey market in the ’30s, the recording artist Clarence Ashley disappeared and the performer Tom Ashley kept on. In 1960, at a fiddler’s convention in North Carolina, he and guitarist Clint Howard and fiddler Fred Price were approached by folklorist Ralph Rinzler, who asked if they had knowledge of a Clarence Ashley, whose bottomless recordings of “The Coo Coo Bird” (1929) and “House Carpenter” (1930) had been collected on Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music.
“Clint Howard recalls the moment,” one can read in the
Greenback Dollar
notes: “Fred and me had known Tom all our lives, but we just knew him as Tom. So I said, ‘No, I don’t. Do you know a Clarence Ashley, Tom?’ Tom started to say, ‘No,’ but then he had a second thought: ‘Hell, I’m Clarence Ashley!’” As a public artist, he began a second life, but musically there was really no change from his first.

Even as a young man, Ashley had a squeaky, baffled old-codger’s tone. He reveled in the deadpan mysteries of “Haunted Road Blues” and “Dark Holler Blues.” But those songs, like “The Coo Coo Bird” and “House Carpenter,” are the high culture of old-timey. On
Greenback Dollar,
drawn from Ashley’s various string bands as well as his solo recordings, low culture pulls harder; hokum rules. Ashley performed in blackface on the minstrel show- medicine show circuit; you can hear the blackface snigger in his remarkably
obscene “My Sweet Farm Girl,” which gets cunnilingus and analingus into a single verse. You can hear the common, secret culture of the south in Ashley’s detailed versions of the true-crime ballads “Frankie Silvers,” “Old John Hardy,” and “Naomi Wise.” And in an extremely vicious reading of “Little Sadie” you can hear a man who might have had reason to forget his own name.

 

Legends of Old Time Music
(Vestapol/Rounder). A video anthology notable for Ashley’s performance of “The Cuckoo”—recorded on the street in the early sixties. Accompanied by Fred Price, Clint Howard, and guitarist Tex Isley, Ashley explains to folklorist D. K. Wilgus what it meant to travel to New York in the twenties to record for Columbia: “How much did the people who making the records know about his music?” “Not anything,” he says, and then he cuts the cards.

 

The Other Side of the Mirror—Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965,
dir. Murray Lerner (Columbia Legacy). Includes Bob Dylan singing the likes of “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” (with Joan Baez on “With God on Our Side”) as Ashley, seated directly behind him, adjusts his hat, repositions an unlit cigar, moves his banjo from his knee to the floor and back to his knee, and altogether does everything he can to remain as polite as possible.

2 September 2001

 

Bob Dylan: “
Love and Theft
”

(Columbia 85975) to be released on September 11

 

There’s an old man who lives in your neighborhood, drinking away his days as if they were bottles. He lives by himself in a small house, though others are known to disappear into it: “Samantha
Brown, lived in my house for about four or five . . . months,” he announces one day on the street, his voice tearing like cloth. “I never slept with her eeeeeven once.” As if anyone cares.

An odd character, in his funny way of nodding as you walk by, in the cadence of his speech when he stops to pass the time—one moment he might be whispering a confidence, the next giving a speech—but also ordinary. He does nod, he does pass the time. On occasion he asks you in, you and your spouse or another neighbor, asks you into his parlor—which really is a parlor. A few old, comfortable chairs, shelves of books. There’s a spinet piano with a collection of sheet music in the compartment in the piano bench, some of it handwritten: his own songs.

Not everything is old-fashioned. The ’65 Mustang in the garage and the ’59 Cadillac at the curb seem to promise a future that merely hasn’t arrived yet. Along with the floral lampshades and throw rugs there’s a CD player and hundreds of CDs, though most are of blues and country tunes recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. “See if there’s anything you want to hear,” he always says, without taking his eyes off you as you choose.

He’s an explainer. One of the songs he sings at the piano, one of his own, is called “Po’ Boy,” though the tune sounds like the folk song “Cocaine.” With a wry couplet (“Call down to room service, say send up the room”) and a knock-knock joke, it tells a story about the Prodigal Son. Seeing you pick a Bukka White CD with his version of the song, or anyway the title—recorded at Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi in 1939, the man points out—he leans back and lets the burst of guitar notes that seem to send this “poor boy long way from home” straight to heaven wash over him like rain, then shows you Ramblin’ Thomas’s 1929 “Poor Boy Blues” (“A Dallas street singer,” he says), then Chuck Berry’s 1964 “Promised Land,” about the odyssey of “the Po’ Boy” from his hometown, Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles.

The song was written when Berry was in federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, the man tells you (“When he wanted an atlas to get the route right, they thought he was planning an escape!”),
but he’s just warming up. “See, what the song is really about is the civil rights movement, the Freedom Riders, the way he plans the Po’ Boy’s bus route to avoid Rock Hill, that’s in South Carolina, a Klan town, then the bus breaks down in Birmingham, where the Klan blew up a church and killed four little girls, that was in 1963, ‘turned into a struggle,’ see? It’s all in this book by a professor named W. T. Lhamon,
Deliberate Speed.”
Nobody has any idea what he’s talking about, but the story is romantic, somehow.

The man’s own songs have pleasant names like “Bye and Bye” or “Moonlight.” The way he sings and plays them, with a phony-looking toothpaste smile, suggests how he once tried to sell them. In moments they sound ridiculously corny—less like Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” than Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy’s “Indian Love Call”—or it’s a parlor from the 19th century that comes into view, and you almost hear the old sentimental songs of home and courtship, family, death, and renewal, even though the songs are off. They’re not as slick as the published tunes that keep them company in the piano bench—though you can tell they were meant to be. Often they end with a sourness, a sting, even a violence, that parlors were made to banish from their doors.

The man takes midnight walks, tramping the streets even to the edge of town, muttering about all he hates, about everything he wants to destroy, preaching or telling dirty stories, gesturing wildly, his hair flying. One night you heard him going on about a woman, it seemed, but then he turned into a general on his horse as quickly as the horse then turned into a pulpit and the general into a prophet. “I’m going to spare the defeated, I’m going to speak to the crowd,” he said, whoever he really was. “I’m going to teach peace to the conquered, I’m going to
tame
the proud.”

Sometimes he sounds crazy, but the same sound can be seductive, especially in his seeming disdain for all those he wants dead, banished, out of his world. You catch something strange and glamorous in his voice: how you might feel if you had the nerve to talk like this. And it can happen right in his house. Suddenly he is speaking with such intensity that you hear his rants as songs and
imagine a band behind them. He begins to speak loudly, angrily, hitting random blues riffs on his piano, then slamming down hard and turning to you to speak of the fun he’s had and that he might—and here he is weirdly threatening—have again. “You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice,” he says, though you haven’t said a word. “I sell it to you at a reduced price.”

Once he told a story about a flood, then began to sing it, without the piano: “You have to hear a banjo now,” he’d said. What followed felt more mystical than real. It was the great 1927 Mississippi flood, it was Noah’s flood, it was Iowa just last spring, it was the entire last century as a giant mistake, crying out for its own cleansing, asking to be washed away before it was too late. “Made it to Kansas City,” he says of someone called Big Joe Turner: in his mouth the words seem to name as well Davy Crockett, Jesse James, John Henry, Stagger Lee, Railroad Bill, each bestriding the continent. He plays with old songs inside the story—the mountain ballad “The Coo Coo,” say, turning the benign lyrics inside out, or revealing their true menace.

“The coo coo, she’s a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies,” he says with easy pleasure, then changing into Robert Mitchum’s preacher in
The Night of the Hunter,
still smiling: “I’m preaching the word of God, I’m putting out your eyes.” Then he goes back to the piano and sings about how he hopes she’ll meet him in the moonlight. Then he passes out, and everyone leaves.

The stories people tell of the nights they’ve spent with the man have long since become local legend. But the legend that sticks hardest comes from what people will call “Sugar Baby”: the message the man leaves on his answering machine when he leaves town. Given what people have heard before, as they listen they can almost spin the slow, deliberate words of the message into singing, and the singing into an elegant orchestration of slow, deliberate chords—something that years from now they won’t be able to get out of their heads. “Sugar Baby,” they’ll still say to each other, probably long after the man himself is dead; it’s become a saying, meaning “That’s life” or “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Some people will remember how the man used to take out an album by a stone-faced character named Dock Boggs, a singer from the Virginia mountains, who first recorded in 1927, the man would carefully explain; he’d play a song called “Sugar Baby.” That was real killer-inside-me stuff; “Sugar Baby” was what Boggs called his lover, who you weren’t sure would survive the song. On the message the man leaves, “Sugar Baby”—the words leading off every refrain—seems to be the name of a horse. The feeling, though—the sense of a life used up, wasted as every life is finally wasted, leaving the earth as if one’s life had never been—is the same. The feeling is that there is all the time in the world to take stock, if only in the ledger you keep in your heart to settle accounts, to tell jokes you half hope no one will get. “I’m staying with Aunt Sally,” the man says on the machine, “but you know she not really my aunt.” You laugh, and then something in his tone pulls you down into the emptiness he’s speaking from. As in the parlor, he has led you to relax into his exile.

 

 

That is just a story. But “
Love and Theft,
” Bob Dylan’s first collection of new songs in four years, is an album of stories, some told to the end, some of the most remarkable only hinted at. “High Water (For Charley Patton)” is both.

Born likely in 1891, Patton, a founder of the Mississippi Delta blues, recorded from 1929 until his death in 1934. “His vowels were stretched out, inflated from within; they expanded until they were all but unrecognizable,” Tom Piazza wrote recently about how hard it can be to hear him—but in the teasing murk of his sound, Piazza said, “he opened a window in time for himself.” It’s that window Dylan walks through as if it were a door. While you can find a transcriptions of the lyrics of Patton’s 1929 “High Water Everywhere,” Patton’s singing could hardly be more underwater: “I firmly believe, and have believed for years,” a man for whom old blues is a second language says, “that Charley Patton is not singing in English on ‘High Water.’” Compared with the dirt in
Patton’s voice, the rubble in Dylan’s may sound as smooth as glass, but the impenetrability of Patton’s song is there in Dylan’s: in riddles and parables.

Verse by verse in Dylan’s “High Water Everywhere,” the flood spreads, takes in and upends more lives, making everyone understand that your freedoms under the Constitution are nothing compared to what God wants from you this night. “You dancing with whom they tell you to,” Dylan has one Bertha Mason say, “or you don’t dance at all.”

“It’s bad out there,” a verse ends. “It’s tough out there.” “Things are breaking up out there.” But then in the midst of the disaster, a fable stands out as if clearing its own space in the maelstrom. “Well,” Dylan says, “George Lewes told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew” (who just walked into a bar):