Bob Dylan (44 page)

 

3) Cover: “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” from Elvis Costello, 1977 (MSG, Nov. 11) He didn’t sing about the shoes; having apparently invested more wisely than the angels, he wore them.

 

4)
The Bootleg Series, Volume 5: Live 1975—The Rolling Thunder Revue
(Columbia) Confusion in almost every vocal, a pound of sugar in almost every arrangement. Right, the famous “donned makeup in the ’70s” period.

 

5) Paul Muldoon, “Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000,” from
‘Do You, Mr. Jones?’—Bob Dylan with the Poets and Professors,
edited
by Neil Corcoran (Chatto & Windus, U.K.) Muldoon is a poet (author most recently of
Moy Sand and Gravel
), co-writer on Warren Zevon’s “My Ride’s Here,” and a professor at Princeton. Leading off this new essay collection with a new poem, Muldoon goes back to a show Dylan played at Princeton in 2000—which took place in Princeton’s Dillon Gym. “You know what, honey? We call that a homonym,” the narrator of the poem says to the woman he’s at the concert with. Muldoon lets the suggestiveness in “homonym”—homage, homunculus, Homoousian—take over; the prosaic moves over an odd surface. Then Dylan’s only previous appearance at Princeton enters the poem—in 1970, when Dylan was present not to play but to accept an honorary degree. “He wouldn’t wear a hood,” the narrator remembers. “You know what, honey? We call that disquietude.”

 

6) Cover: “Something,” from George Harrison, 1969 (MSG, Nov. 13) A final encore, done very straight. Musicians love this song; musicians admire the ability to craft anything that’s at once generic, anonymous and likely to generate income for a hundred years.

 

7) “Summer Days” (MSG, Nov. 11) The turnaround cut from the seven-years-overdue unreleased live album “Having a Rave-up with Bob Dylan!”

 

8) “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (MSG, Nov. 11) Dylan’s first performance of the song since he recorded it with the Hawks in a basement of a big pink house in upstate New York thirty-five years ago. Two of the five who were there then are dead. The house was recently on the market as a prime Dylan collectable. The tune still blew the air of pure American fedupness: “Pack up the meat, sweet, we’re headin’ out.”

 

9) “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” (MSG, Nov. 11) From 1964. The audience always waits to cheer for “Sometimes even the president of the United States must have to stand naked.” By now the number has outlasted almost as many presidents as Fidel
Castro: Lyndon Johnson (no problem, for a man who liked to receive guests while sitting on the toilet), Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton (who as president was stripped naked, and who you can imagine singing the line to himself) and now George W. Bush. The line took nothing away from him. He lives in the armor of his own entitlement, and he may outlast the song.

 

10) “All Along the Watchtower” (MSG, Nov. 11) The second of two encores, it began very strangely, with guitarist Charlie Sexton rolling a few spare notes that seemed to call up a distant Western—Jim Jarmusch’s
Dead Man,
maybe, with Neil Young’s improvised and timeless guitar soundtrack. It was in fact the opening of Ferrante & Tiecher’s 1961 twin-piano hit “Theme from
Exodus,
” from the movie based on Leon Uris’s 1958 novel about the creation of the state of Israel. Whether you caught the reference or not, it took the song about to emerge from its own history—one of Dylan’s most world-ending, from 1968, a year that over and over again felt like the end of the world—out of itself. Now the song was going to speak with a new voice: that was the promise that little introduction made.

It was impossible to imagine that Dylan ever played the song with more vehemence, or that, this night, six days after the mid-term congressional elections, the performance was not utterly political, as much a protest song as “Masters of War.” Not when, after Dylan, Sexton and guitarist Larry Campbell led an overwhelming instrumental climb through the tune’s themes following the closing verse, Dylan came back to the mike to sing the opening verse again in a wild voice, throwing the last lines across the seats and out of the hall like a curse: “Businessmen they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth / None of them, along the line, know what—any—any of it—any of it is—worth.”

 

3 February 2003

 

6)
The Portable Sixties Reader,
edited by Ann Charters (Penguin). At more than 600 pages, a definitively clueless anthology ending with bad poems about the deaths of the decade’s top ten dead people. Count down! Ten! Hemingway! Nine! Marilyn Monroe! Eight! John F. Kennedy! “When I woke up they’d stole a man away,” says Eric von Schmidt—hey, who’s “they”? As Donovan used to say, “I really want to know,” but never mind, Seven! Sylvia Plath! Six! Malcolm X! Five! Martin Luther King, Jr.! Four!
Robert
F. Kennedy! Three! Neal Cassady! Two! Janis Joplin! And topping the chart: Jack Kerouac! With a straight obit from the
Harvard Crimson!
Solid! But Janis died in 1970. If she can get in, why not Jimi Hendrix? Captain Beefheart played a soprano sax solo for him the day his death was announced that said more than anything here.

 

9 April 2003

 

3) Bob Dylan for Victoria’s Secret (Fox, March 4) “Only two things in this world worth botherin’ your head about and them’s sex and death,” says a “debauched Midwestern businessman” in Michael O’Donoghue and Frank Springer’s 1968 comic serial
The Adventures of Phoebe Zeitgeist.
That’s the only explanation for the commercial that uses Dylan’s suicidal 1997 “Love Sick” to orchestrate a montage of underwear models looking dour under their hooded eyes. But it’s a better Dylan setting than the nearly four-hours-long God-blessed-the-Confederacy film
Gods and Generals,
which features his “’Cross the Green Mountain.” I haven’t seen the picture, but I have seen the TV trailer featuring Robert Duvall sitting in a chair as Robert E. Lee and opining, through a mouthful of molasses, “’s in Gawd’s han’s naw,” as if to say, “Hey, don’t blame me.” On the other hand, “Love Sick” is an actual song. At more than eight dying minutes, “’Cross the Green Mountain” might as well be the movie.

 

16 July 2003

 

2) Bob Dylan in
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
(Sony Pictures) Ken Tucker writes in: “Not on the KICK-ASS soundtrack album to this KICK-ASS movie—who needs him there, when you’ve got Nickelback and Kid Rock collaborating on a KICK-ASS version of Elton’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”? No, Dylan sneaks in during the scene in which a KICK-ASS Drew Barrymore gathers her belongings to leave Angel headquarters, and we clearly see that one of her few cherished possessions is a vinyl copy of
Bringing It All Back Home.
So the real mystery of the movie is, who wanted that product placement in a film filled with shots plugging Cingular Wireless and Body By Demi? My guess? Crispin Glover had been using the album on the set to get himself in the mood to play a bitter, religion-warped mute, and director McG did what he does best, which is stealing cultural totems and reducing them to throwaway junk-jokes that make the viewer feel as though the ASS of anything in life that matters has been KICKED.”

Fall 2004
¹⁹

 

There’s a great sweep to the Band’s story, beginning in Arkansas and Ontario in the 1950s, tracing an arc through to the last year of the twentieth century. It’s a far-reaching bow that carried Levon Helm (born in 1940 in Marvell, Arkansas), Robbie Robertson (1943, Toronto), Rick Danko (1942, Green’s Corners), Richard Manuel (1943, Stratford), and Garth Hudson (1937, London) through their barnstorming years as Ronnie Hawkins’s and then
Levon’s Hawks in the early sixties, into the noise they made as the unnamed musicians backing Bob Dylan’s furious shows in 1965 and 1966, and to their fraternal refounding as the Band in the Big Pink house in Woodstock, New York, in 1967. The curve brought their offer of a new music and a new point of view—a point of view that was also a sense of weight, a sense of weight that in the fractured, whirling America of the late 1960s and early ’70s was as much as anything a kind of gravity. The arc circled over the finale of the Last Waltz in San Francisco in 1976, after which Robbie Robertson left the group and the rest played on as the Band, but with barely any new music of their own, without, in some cursed way, a voice, playing back through their own past in small clubs like the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Winter Park, Florida, where, following a show in 1986, Richard Manuel hanged himself. It was an arc that bent toward an end but even through another decade did not reach it—an arc that touched down only in the last month of 1999, when Rick Danko died in Woodstock, and Levon Helm and Garth Hudson let the working name of the Band die with him.

That is one way to tell the story—but there are moments all through the Band’s music where the Band’s story seems to tell itself. In “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” these are moments which are also incidents, or events, where something happens and then is over, or lost, left behind by the story which is also the song, a story that returns to what was lost as the song rounds its next turn, and so the cruelest moment of the song is when it ends.

It was 1969 when the song appeared as the last track on
The Band,
the group’s second album, but there is no fixed time in the music. The music sounds old, but in the way a landscape can feel old; in the same way that a landscape promises it will renew itself, the music points to the future. It seems to assume its own permanence, that it is a language that will always be understood, and it’s a shock when you realize the singer seems most of all convinced that no one will understand what he’s talking about, or care if they do.

“Corn in the fields . . . Listen to the rice as the wind blows cross the water”: as if speaking for the landscape, not as someone with a name and a fate, Levon Helm leads the first chorus. As he taps his
cymbals, drawing a circle around himself, Garth Hudson’s clavinette drops rain into the image of a farm alive with movement and sound, weather and work, so alive you can believe you can hear the crops grow. “I remember from my youth, people out there in the country somewhere, in a place we all know, it may have been there, it may have not,” Robbie Robertson said nearly thirty years after he wrote the song, fixing it in “the idea of ‘Come autumn, come fall’—
that’s
when life begins. It’s not the springtime, where we kind of think it begins, it is the fall—the harvests come in.”

Richard Manuel, the tale-teller, is less a singer than an actor inside the verses of the song. In an instant, drawing words out of his throat as if the act takes all the strength he has, as much strength as the Band itself uses as it pulls the rhythms of the song against its melody, he makes it plain that the pastoral vision of the opening chorus is inhuman. It has no room for failure, defeat, fear, shame—everything this man’s voice is made of. The warm assurance of each prayerful “Corn . . . in the fields” is his memory mocking him, the ruined farm he left behind now leaving him walking city streets filled with bums and drunks. As he describes the disasters of his life, never mentioning the family that must have worked the farm with him, that he has left behind as well, the desperation in his voice grows stronger, more pathetic, more absolute. Each time the promise of the trees, the meadow, the moon, of people celebrating the harvest, circles him in a chorus, the promise seems at once irredeemable and undeniable, a truth that is also a lie, a lie that is also the truth.

Nothing in the man’s voice is so flesh-crawlingly pitiful as the faith he puts in the union that he insists will save him and all those like him, a union for farmers at the mercy of speculators, a union for factory workers treated like machinery, to be discarded when they break—it isn’t clear and it doesn’t matter. The desperation is greatest in the man’s awful cry of belief, so great its language breaks into pieces, the classic pledge “I’m a union man, now and always” falling apart as it’s spoken: “I’m a union and now always . . .” But that terror may even be worse in the utter lack of
irony with which the man describes the promise of the union, even as the broken promise of the land he has abandoned, that has cast him out, shadows his words: “Here come a man with a paper and pen, telling us our hard times are about to end—” In American folk language, the man with a paper and pen means only one thing: the con man who will shake your hand, look you in the eye, and charm you into signing away everything you have, even if it is only your name. “I’m bound to come out on top,” the singer says, and Richard Manuel makes you believe that the man in the song believes what he says, and then you do turn away, ashamed to listen any longer.

Or rather you would, if the song did not, when the singer finishes his story, turn into a different story: more complex and impossible to fix. In a few stanzas, the song has caught a repeating story—a farmer and his farm in Wisconsin in the horrifying depression of the 1890s, in Oklahoma and Arkansas in the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the depression that doesn’t make the news, the depression that for a family farm in any state or province can arrive at any time. But the man has only told you what he can put into words, and there is a way in which it is only when the words end that the song begins.

You don’t want to separate one element of the music from another; you want the music to sweep you up and take you away, and it does that. But over the years, as you return to the song, or find it returning to you, on the radio, on a CD player in a store—or in the instant of first playing it, then finding yourself unable to play anything else, playing the song again and again, as if to prove the music is as inexhaustible as it seems to be—the parts of the music stand up in turn.