Bob Dylan (53 page)

The band is Tony Garnier, bass, Larry Campbell, guitar, Stu Kimble, guitar, George Recile, drums. Over many years on Dylan’s stages, Garnier and Campbell have probably accompanied him with a deeper affinity than anyone else, and the result here is that Dylan takes the song with such command it feels as if he’s playing every instrument, not merely his own piano and harmonica. How could other hands know what to do? It’s all moving so fast, with such coursing strength, the rhythm its own flood, cutting its own banks out of the melody, the singer’s out-of-the-ground voice all but laughing at its own power: after all, it was he who blew up the dam in the first place. The piece has the rockabilly flash of Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train,” the defiant syncopation of Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years,” the sly menace of Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy,” the all-hell-is-breaking-loose thrill of Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story.” At its highest pitch, the singer seems to be trying to top himself, growl against growl, grin against grin, oath against oath, reveling in some otherworldly two-man standup comedy routine that’s only a few steps away from the circular firing squad at the end of
Reservoir Dogs.
It moves past so quickly that the music seems to fragment, and you catch echoes of voices from much farther back, from before anyone in this song was born, whispering that they knew the song before the singer did, that they always knew it sounded just like this, and that they’re in on the joke: that when you’re “cold irons bound” you’re on the way to your deathbed.

Both the standard and expanded versions of
Tell Tale Signs
include unusually illuminating, engaging liner notes by Larry “Ratso” Sloman, who wrote a book about Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder tour, and has happily survived turning up dead in Kinky Friedman’s 1993 mystery
Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola;
the deluxe edition packages Sloman’s commentary in an illustrated book and adds an art book collecting sleeves from Dylan singles from Columbia outlets far and wide to go with the extra third disc. And though it emerges far more completely across three CDs, the story told is of a piece.

The music Bob Dylan has made since 1992 has been based on a hunch that there is a body of American song, or an American ethos of expression, that is a constant. It’s a scattered form that in words and metaphors, riffs and moans, hesitations and shouts, can always be rediscovered, and can rediscover and renew whoever remembers it, as if one can not only speak but listen in tongues. Collecting mostly alternate studio or live versions of material already released (“Ring Them Bells” and “Most of the Time” from the otherwise cramped 1989
Oh Mercy,
“Ain’t Talkin’” from the 2006
Modern Times
), soundtrack compositions (“Huck’s Tune” from
Lucky You,
the endless “’Cross the Green Mountains” from the misbegotten Civil War epic
Gods and Generals
), and abandoned songs now heard for the first time (“Marchin’ to the City,” “Dreamin’ of You,” “Red River Shore,” all left off of
Time Out of Mind
), the twenty-seven tracks of the standard
Tell Tale Signs,
and the twelve additional numbers in the expanded package, trace Bob Dylan’s exploration of this territory. There are blind alleys (the programmatic “Dignity,” the ready-made protest song “Everything Is Broken”), and alleys made for muggings (“Tryin’ to Get to You,” its initial Carter Family shape dissolved on stage in London in 2000 as it’s sung by someone who must have looked like Bob Dylan but sounds exactly like the sort of fifties crooner the critic Nik Cohn once described as “white, sleek, nicely spoken, and phony to your toenails”—and it’s a tour de force). There are variations that don’t expand the possibilities of a song but wear it out (the three
Time
Out of Mind
versions of “Mississippi,” which was rerecorded for the 2001
“Love and Theft”
).

At first it can seem like a pile of footnotes and appendices. But as a fan’s compendium of Dylan’s thirty-one 1993 live performances of the folk song “Jim Jones” (from
Good as I Been to You
) makes plain—as over nine months on tour the song’s melody swallows its words, its words spur a new force in its rhythm, and finally the rhythm turns toward abstraction, and the song’s narrator, a prisoner sent from London to the hell-hole of nineteenth-century Australia, becomes a figment of his own imagination, his own land-locked Flying Dutchman—there is no end to what, when the spirit is right, Dylan can do with a song. A performance that at first seems flat reveals layers; a singer missing the cues in his own words turns out to be after something else entirely. The music here won’t be heard the first time around.

For just that reason, there is little point in saying that “Red River Shore,” despite the tragedy of its story, is as open as the plains, the only limit to what it can say a matter of whether you can see from one end of its Kansas to the other. After a few listenings, it might seem too sweet, not the tragedy it means to be at all. As you listen it might be replaced at the top of this set’s chart by “Most of the Time,” a song so carefully composed you can imagine that had Dean Martin or Fred Astaire had the chance to record it their versions would have been better than Dylan’s—and as Dylan performs it, solo on the first disc, with quiet, retreating accompaniment on the third, it can make you lose track of time, to the point that the fact that
Tell Tale Signs
has dropped its clues over nearly two decades need mean nothing at all.

Winter 2008

 

In 1964, a man named Sam McGee cut a new version of a tune he’d first recorded in 1934: “Railroad Blues.”

In the way that McGee’s guitar seemed to have twenty strings and McGee himself four hands, he was a whole orchestra. In the way he shouted as his notes rushed past—shouting “Wah-HOO!” like Harmonica Frank Floyd recording “Rocking Chair Daddy” for Sam Phillips in Memphis in 1951, like Elvis Presley recording “Mystery Train” for Phillips four years later, an entire era later—in the way McGee aimed his voice at the sky, he was standing by himself on top of a mountain, alone in the world, not another sign of human presence as far as his eyes could see.

But whatever image came to mind as McGee’s “Railroad Blues” played, you couldn’t imagine the man who was spinning the song standing still. As the tune played, the player went from one place to another. And he was no longer merely Sam McGee. From the first move into the tune—an almost unbearably delicious downward swoop on a fat bass note, making you feel as if you were being lifted off your feet—from that first gesture, the player was something bigger, more various. He was Daniel Boone with faster feet; Johnny Appleseed with songs for pips; Cooper’s Leather-stocking with a sense of humor; Huck Finn as an old man, having long since discovered, in words Edmund Wilson wrote in 1922, “for what drama” his “setting was the setting.”

The drama was to make a sound that would prove to all the world that the world remained to be made, or even found. “Went to the depot, looked up on the board,” McGee sang for a first verse, taking a commonplace line and throwing it away, out of the
way of the story he was telling with his guitar. “Went to the depot, looked up on the board / It read, ‘Good times here, but better down the road.’”

Whoever it is who’s playing, in an instant you can see him standing on a table in a bar full of drunks, and then in a concert hall, dashing back and forth from one side of the stage to the other as an audience of respectful folk revivalists sits thrilled and confused. You can glimpse a man walking into a barbershop looking for change, filling his hat, then tossing the coins back at the rounders like Levon Helm in the Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” telling the tale of what his Bessie did with her half of their racetrack winnings: “Tore it up and threw it in my face, just for a laugh.”

Who is this man—not Sam McGee, but the figure who comes to life as Sam McGee plays?

He is one of many figures who appear in American vernacular music as it was recorded in the 1920s and ’30s—who appear with such force, and such charm, such a broad smile or such an implacable scowl as to claim the whole of the country’s story as if it were his or hers alone.

It is incontestable, for example, that there is no room for the creature running through “Railroad Blues” in the nation established by Bela Lam and his Greene County Singers, as they recorded in Richmond, Virginia, when OKeh Records held a joint recording session there in 1929—which featured as well the Monarch Jubilee Quartet, the Roanoke Jug Band, the Tubsize Hawaiian Orchestra, the Bubbling Over Five, and eight other acts.

Born around 1870, dead in 1944, Zandervon Orbeliah Lamb was a big man with a big white handlebar moustache. The Greene County Singers were Lam (as OKeh spelled out his name), his wife Rose, their son Alva, and Rose’s brother Paul. In 1927, in New York City, they recorded a profoundly peaceful version of “See That My Grave Is Kept Green,” an old song about the countless unmarked graves from the Civil War that found its way into Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” In 1929 in Richmond, though, the sylvan glade was nowhere in evidence.

Bizarrely atonal banjo and guitar clang unpleasantly into even uglier singing, into nothing that can be called a rhythm or a melody, but rather a translation into music of a conviction so murderously complete, so uninterested in what you think you believe, that suddenly you feel very small—on the outside of a story that is yours whether you like it or not. The story of Jesus Christ, your Savior, come to take you, in the person of the Greene County Singers.

“Tell It Again”—the refrain sounds like “Kill it again”—is people rooted to their ground, certain no merely human force can move them an inch. “If Tonight Should End the World” is a procession of singers stumbling down the street—stumbling because they can’t keep time, because their harmonies are as arthritic as their hands must be, if their cracked and quivering voices are any clue to their age. But the music builds on itself, until you, too, are waiting for the end of the world. If tonight should end the world, then—what? They know; you don’t.

It isn’t that the faithful in “If Tonight Should End the World” would turn away from the man in “Railroad Blues” as a sinner, or that they would turn him away from their church. They don’t recognize him. He doesn’t exist. They are people who move into the settlement the railroad bluesman has just left, working hard, looking straight ahead, raising the church, building the town, so that when the man blows back into the place in a year or so, he won’t even know where he is.

To the Greene County Singers, free in their knowledge that history has already come to an end, free in the embrace of the Lord, the rounder is no more than a prisoner, a prisoner of his own animal appetites, and against people like him, their town has no need for a jail. Bela Lam’s banjo picks out “Crown Him” (“Lord above”), and you can feel that they are already in another world, even as they claim this one.

In the same way, it’s hard to imagine the free American in “Railroad Blues” countenancing the destroyed individual in Emry Arthur’s 1928 “I’m a Man of Constant Sorrow.”

It’s not, today, an obscure song. Bob Dylan recorded a version of it early in his career. As “The Maid of Constant Sorrow,” Judy Collins sang it with pseudo-Elizabethan preciousness at the height of the folk revival. The Stanley Brothers recorded it, and many more. In 2001, in the Coen Brothers’s film
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, and Chris Thomas King—for the moment the Soggy Bottom Boys, with Dan Tyminski of Alison Krauss’s band the voice behind Clooney’s dashing mike work—swept the movie’s south with it, and you didn’t doubt for a minute that everyone there wanted to hear it more than they wanted to hear anything else.

But Emry Arthur, who in 1929 accompanied the banjoist Dock Boggs on guitar, who, Boggs recalled, “had been shot through the hands—he couldn’t reach the chords—bullets went through his hands,” was the first to record “Man of Constant Sorrow.”

Say the first lines: “I am a man of constant sorrow / I’ve seen trouble all my days.” They are instantly, overwhelmingly sentimental—and unless you completely ignore the lines as you sing, as the Soggy Bottom Boys do, going for speed and flash, they are impossible not to dramatize. As Dylan and Collins found, the more quietly you sing the lines, the louder they become—and the more of a poseur they reveal you to be.

Arthur bangs on his guitar as if he’s been shot through the hands. You can almost see the bones sticking out. Plink, plink, he says, no more musically than Bela Lam. “I am a man of constant sorrow,” he says plainly, as if he were saying “I am hungry,” or “I am cold,” as if he’s learned to say such things with dignity. “I have seen trouble all my days.” It’s that “have,” instead of the usual contraction of “I’ve,” that says what the singer is saying is not obvious, not common, not something you really want to hear about.

You can imagine the Greene County Singers trying to pull Emry Arthur into their fold. They would recognize him, if only because they speak the same blank language, the Greene County Singers singing as if they don’t care if you hear them, Emry Arthur as if he can’t believe anyone would listen. But why would the man in “Railroad Blues” even pause? In his thin voice, which imperceptibly
moves from bitterness to acceptance, from anger to peace, the figure in “Man of Constant Sorrow” offers a kind of challenge, a rebuke to God’s gifts, and it’s this that will keep him out of Bela Lam’s church.

After a verse or two, the tunelessness of Arthur’s performance settles into a hurdy-gurdy beat, and you are no longer afraid of the singer. He has put you at ease, so he can put you on the spot, so he can show you how absolutely you will never know him: