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Warning - long, rambling post ensues.
I've been on a bit of a Dylan sabbatical of late, having overdosed on him a bit over the last few years. I suspect that'll be changing soon, though - firstly, there's the Scorsese doc, which, when I finally get to see it (which'll probably be when the DVD comes out, as it's unlikely to hit Norwegian TV any time soon), will doubtless provoke a massive resurgence in my Bob-listening, though - I'm never away from him long, anyway. Secondly, I'm seeing him in concert again in a few weeks' time, and I always like to spend a bit of time listening to people before seeing them play live.
I wrote my Master's dissertation on Dylan, so obviously I'm approaching this from a devoted fan's perspective, but I'm rather looking forward to seeing No Direction Home. I doubt it'll tell me anything significantly new, but there's a good deal of footage which I'm looking forward to seeing for the first time - books and records can only take you so far, after all. I've heard from a few people that it's a little too uncritical, but that was pretty inevitable, and I can live with it - it's not like there are too many serious criticisms which can be credibly levelled at Dylan's mid-'60s output, anyway. What did those Barbeloids who actually watched it think of it, either as a film, as a documentary, or just as a musical document? I'd be interested in your opinions.
The only downside I can really see to the current resurgence in critical attention to Dylan which the film seems to be arousing is that, as usual, it's directed almost exclusively at his mid-'60s output. Granted, it was probably the most sensible period of his career to focus the film on - there's an incredible amount of previously-unseen footage available, it's still the period which even casual viewers are most likely to be interested in, and there's precious little arguing with the sheer, blinding magnificence of the material he produced between '63-'66, both live and in the studio. On the other hand, it's a period which has already been pretty heavily covered in books, film, and retrospective album releases, and focusing public attention on it yet again, at the expense of his later work, does Dylan's reputation something of a disservice. For my money, as near-unimpeachable asFreewheeling..., Another Side Of Bob Dylan, the Bringing It All Back Home/Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde On Blonde triptych, and the various live recordings which are available from that era generally are (I really don't rate The Times They Are A-Changin' all that highly - it's not without a certain po-faced charm, but it's a very dry, slightly forced, and distinctly dated work compared to the other albums I listed), they're definitely equalled, and at times even surpassed by a good deal of his later, less well-known material.
Just take the lyrics to 'Foot Of Pride' - a relatively minor song from the '80s (far and away his lowest point, creatively, critically and commercially) which never even made it to an album (there's a version on the Bootleg Series Vol. I-III box set, which came out in 1991):
Like the lion tears the flesh off of a man
So can a woman who passes herself off as a male
They sang "Danny Boy" at his funeral and the Lord's Prayer
Preacher talking 'bout Christ betrayed
It's like the earth just opened and swallowed him up
He reached too high, was thrown back to the ground
You know what they say about bein' nice to the right people on the way up
Sooner or later you gonna meet them comin' down
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back
Hear ya got a brother named James, don't forget faces or names
Sunken cheeks and his blood is mixed
He looked straight into the sun and said revenge is mine
But he drinks, and drinks can be fixed
Sing me one more song, about ya love me to the moon and the stranger
And your fall by the sword love affair with Erroll Flynn
in these times of compassion when conformity's in fashion
Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in.
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back
There's a retired businessman named Red, cast down from heaven and he's out of his head
He feeds off of everyone that he can touch
He said he only deals in cash or sells tickets to a plane crash
He's not somebody that you play around with much
Miss Delilah is his, a Philistine is what she is
She'll do wondrous works with your fate
Feed you coconut bread, spice buns in your bed
If you don't mind sleepin' with your head face down in a grave.
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back
Well they'll choose a man for you to meet tonight
You'll play the fool and learn how to walk through doors
How to enter into the gates of paradise
No, how to carry a burden too heavy to be yours
Yeah, from the stage they'll be tryin' to get water outta rocks
A whore will pass the hat, collect a hundred grand and say thanks
They like to take all this money from sin, build big universities to study in
Sing "Amazing Grace" all the way to the Swiss banks
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back
They got some beautiful people out there, man
They can be a terror to your mind and show you how to hold your tongue
They got mystery written all over their forehead
They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young
They don't believe in mercy
Judgment on them is something that you'll never see
They can exalt you up or bring you down main route
Turn you into anything that they want you to be
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back
Yes, I guess I loved him too
I can still see him in my mind climbin' that hill
Did he make it to the top, well he probably did and dropped
Struck down by the strength of the will
Ain't nothin' left here partner, just the dust of a plague that has left this whole town afraid
From now on, this'll be where you're from
Let the dead bury the dead. Your time will come
Let hot iron blow as he raised the shade
Well, there ain't no goin' back when your foot of pride come down
Ain't no goin' back
That's a song which even fairly enthusiastic Dylan fans could easily overlook, and I humbly submit that it's a masterpiece - one which is even (unusually for Dylan, whose best work often reads rather flatly on the page) easily appreciated without ever hearing the rather wonderful music the words were originally set to. The third verse, recasting Milton's Satan as "a retired businessman named Red..." is particularly brilliant, particularly in its subtle-but-presumably-deliberate echo of the lyrics to his own, earlier 'Highway 61 Revisited', which contains several similarly-apocalyptic depictions of corrupt businessmen dealing in death and destruction.
In 1984, of course, Bob Dylan disagreed with me, in an instance of shockingly poor judgement which is a frustratingly-typical example of why he's fallen somewhat from the popular radar over the last 25 years, in spite of having produced much of his best material in the same period. Despite the presence in his back pocket of songs like 'Foot of Pride', 'Blind Willie McTell', 'Angelina', and others (several of which remain legally unavailable to this day) he compiled the album Infidels. An album which, I feel it's worth those lucky enough not to have heard knowing, features the following lyric, taken from the unimaginably horrible 'Sweetheart Like You';
You know, a woman like you should be at home,
That's where you belong,
Watching out for someone who loves you true
Who would never do you wrong.
Just how much abuse will you be able to take?
Well, there's no way to tell by that first kiss.
What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?
The greatest songwriter (and, arguably, the most significant poet) of the post-war generation somehow felt that this doggerel was worthy of release. Inconceivably, his next three albums were even worse. Of course, he was very, very drunk at the time, but that really isn't enough of an excuse. As a Dylan fan, it's a source of considerable frustration to me that, of all the many truly majestic songs he produced over the course of the 1980s, approximately 3 were actually commercially released. And they were on otherwise-shit albums (I'm ignoring the actually-pretty-good Oh Mercy from 1989 partly because I still don't think it's as great as many critics do, and partly because it ruins the thrust of my argument, such as it is).
That's without even mentioning the 1970s, which produced the marvellous Blood On The Tracks (which is, of his post-1966 albums, probably the only one to have really received the popular attention it so richly deserves), the horribly under-rated Street Legal (from which I'd suggest that 'The Changing Of The Guards', 'Senor', and 'Where Are You Tonight?' in particular are easily the equal of any of the deservedly-acclaimed songs already mentioned in this thread), among a number of other lesser-but-still-pretty-damn-good-by-anyone-else's-standards albums. Or the 1990s, which saw him finally regain a degree of critical and commercial success with the slightly overrated (but still remarkable) Time Out Of Mind, as well as redefining his art to a degree never even attempted by any comparable major artist with a never-ending series of occasionally-magnificent, occasionally-shambolic, but always-fascinating concert performances. Or even the last 5 years, during which he's produced yet another superb-but-overlooked album (Love & Theft, a title which sums up Dylan's life-long relationship with American music almost as eloquently as the album itself does), a fascinating, idiosyncratic and criminally-underrated/ignored film, Masked And Anonymous, and a totally unexpected, and quite marvellous, surprisingly matter-of-fact and readable autobiography.
With luck, the success of No Direction Home will result in more attention being paid to Dylan's later career, instead of simply indulging the lazy nostalgia which reflections on '60s music seem all too prone to. But I'm not holding my breath.
Sigh. But then I listen to 'Blind Willie McTell', and everything's OK again. |
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