Approaching Bob Dylan's Modern Times
Since its Irish release on August 25, I’ve been listening to Modern Times in all sorts of situations; on the house stereo, in the car, walking in the countryside, even in a hospital bed recovering from surgery, and I’m sorry to have to say that apart from two great moments….
But before I go any further, let me tell you where I’m coming from. Though I suspect that my family might call me something else, I would describe myself simply as a big Bob Dylan fan, . I have all the official albums, hundreds of bootlegs, scores of books, fanzines and DVDs. I go to as many of his concerts as I possibly can; I am familiar with many of his musical antecedents; I know a fair bit about his family origins, and hardly a day goes by but I think of some aspect of his life or work. But one affliction I hope I don’t suffer from is blind devotion. Unlike many Dylanologists (How I dislike that word, but at least it beats Bobcats and Dylanophiles, not to mention a species I’ve actually been addressed as – Hi Bobaroo! – but thankfully never encountered in the flesh) for whom everything Dylan does is absolutely perfect, I am the first to admit that no artist is flawless, and that sometimes – too often on recent albums – Bob Dylan most definitely has shown the proverbial feet of clay.
My involvement with Dylan’s music goes back a long time. I have a vivid memory of being perched on the dinner table – my folk-club stool – pretending not to watch myself in the kitchen mirror as I murder Blowin’ in the Wind. I can see my sunburst Egmond (bought the previous Christmas for one pound, seventeen and six); I can feel the strings an inch above the fretboard, my D, G and A painfully prised from Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day. When I’d finally mastered the three-chord-trick, I remember daydreaming about all the songs I was going to write – JD’s Dream, Talkin’ Coote Street Blues, The Lonesome Life of Bridgie Farrell – but, thankfully, none of them – as James Joyce said about a story he had once tried to write – ever got “any forrader than the title”.
Over the next few years I immersed myself in Irish and English traditional music. In college, I played mostly Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon – the ladies weren’t too impressed by The Verdant Braes of Skreen – but, with a clarity that is luminous, I can recall one Major Dylan Moment when B. P. Fallon, an Irish DJ later half-famous for appearing on Top of the Pops with John Lennon, played the just-released Nashville Skyline from start to finish; a few of us huddled around the transistor, horrified by the voice crooning through the static; our reaction presaging Greil Marcus’ notorious response to a later Dylan album: What is this shit?
Blood on the Tracks reignited my interest – I remember staying up late to work out the open tuning; the small-hours silence broken by my brand-new Yamaha FG180 – but when he found Jesus in the late 1970’s I abandoned Bob Dylan again. The slick production on Slow Train Coming really turned me off but, as I discovered many years later when the Internet introduced me to the vast new world of bootlegs, the live performance of those religious songs inspired some of his all-time greatest singing. Although I liked bits and pieces from the 1980’s – I and I and Most of the Time remain firm favourites – it wasn’t until the late 1990’s that I really got back into Dylan – the Internet played a large part in this – and, with the zeal of the ‘re-converted’, I listened to everything, attended as many live concerts as I could; read more esoteric stuff than was good for anyone’s health…
So, why have I given you this potted history of my adventures in the realms of Dylanology? Primarily because I love writing about anything to do with music but, on a more subliminal level, I suspect that it has something to do with establishing my credentials as an informed fan, someone who’s entitled and qualified to be as critical as he feels.
**** From the earliest days of his career in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan has ‘borrowed’ from other songs and performers. Song to Woody, his first major composition, for instance, uses the melody of Woody Guthrie’s 1913 Massacre – which, in turn, derives from the old ballad One Morning in May – and its most striking line about the men “That come with the dust and are gone with the wind” echoes the plight of Guthrie’s migrants in his Pastures of Plenty: “We come with the dust and we go with the wind.” No doubt, the young Dylan intended his song as a sincere tribute – On his arrival in New York, he described himself as a “Woody Guthrie jukebox”. Liam Clancy, for reasons not unrelated perhaps to one of the themes of this essay, said he was like blotting paper – and I would accept it as such and say no more, were it not for the huge amount of similar appropriations throughout his long career. A few random examples: Blowin’ in the Wind adapts the melody of the old slave song No More Auction Block (Dylan’s rendition of which, incidentally, at the Gaslight Café in New York in October 1962 is, to my ears, one of his most moving live performances); Farewell is closely related of the well-known Leaving Of Liverpool; Restless Farewell and With God On Our Side use the tunes of The Parting Glass and The Patriot Game respectively, while I Pity The Poor Emigrant and I Dreamed I saw St Augustine do the same with Come All Ye Tramps and Hawkers and Joe Hill. And I haven’t even mentioned the myriad of blues phrases that have found their way – or been dragged – into countless Dylan songs. I might have no problem with any of this if he simply acknowledged these ‘borrowings’, but no, each of the above examples – plus many, many more – are, according to his official website, copyright Bob Dylan.
Such borrowings, inspirations, thefts, appropriations or whatever you want to call them are usually defended by Those Who Idolise Bob (TWIB) by (a) calling them 'allusions' (b) referring to 'the folk process' (c) Quoting T. S. Eliot. Let’s examine each of these. (a) There is a world of difference between allusion and downright pilfering. The former is an implied or indirect reference. For example, the yellow dressing-gown worn by Buck Mulligan in the opening lines of Joyce's Ulysses – a veritable cornucopia of allusion – alludes to the portrayal of Judas in Christian Symbolism, thereby reinforcing our impression of Stephen Dedalus' opinion of Mulligan. That's an allusion. Another definition of which might be: A word or phrase that amplifies what actually appears on the pages, a verbal incendiary device, if you like, that explodes in your head with a hundred possibilities. But there is nothing allusive about changing a word or line or two in someone else's work and calling it your own.
(Before I go any further, I think I should say something about my already apparent obsession with James Joyce, and also the reference to TWIB above. The two constants, the presiding deities, so to speak, in my cultural life are Bob Dylan and James Joyce, and, most days, something to do with one or the other comes into my head without knocking. Get a life, clear your head, I hear you snigger and maybe you’re right.)
As if it were an article of faith, TWIB steadfastly maintain that Bob Dylan is capable of doing no wrong. Think Papal infallibility for Catholics. Apart from such extreme opinions, TWIB are also capable of behaviour that might be considered unusual. I have met various members of the tribe who listen to absolutely nothing except Bob Dylan’s music; I know someone who has a huge library of books about Dylan and has never opened a page of any of them. I know someone else who has a roomful of bootlegs, but has never listened to the original Blood on the Tracks and has no desire to. Instead, the experience is being saved for some Profound Moment, some Grand Epiphany when, no doubt, the mystery of life, which came first, the chicken or the egg, how much is the doggy in the window, will all be revealed.
Anyway, back to (b) above. For almost a century now, in the so-called developed world, there has been no such thing as 'the folk process'. Before the introduction of mechanical recording, and subsequent means of mass communication, such a process, based on oral composition, oral transmission and the fallibility of human memory, did obviously exist, but this is no longer the case. If we accept that the sine qua non of ‘the folk process’ is oral composition and transmission, then, in terms of composition, Bob Dylan never was a folk artist. It’s as simple as that. He may, of course, pace our coffee-house friend in Talkin’ New York, have been a folk singer, but that’s another day’s work.
T.S Eliot’s comment – in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism – that immature poets imitate; mature poets steal, is often trotted out by TWIB as a justification for Dylan’s ‘borrowings’. But what isn’t so freely broadcast is that, in the same paragraph, Eliot also says that “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” To my mind, it is that final clause that is applicable to much of Dylan’s recent work.
The liner notes of the archly-titled “Love and Theft” album of 2001 proclaim that all songs are written by Bob Dylan. Needless to say, there is absolutely no acknowledgement of the disparate sources he has plundered to write these songs. For example, the very first notes you’ll hear are a direct lift from Uncle John’s Bongos by country duo Johnnie and Jack from 1961. And so it goes, right through the album…. As diligent research by fans all over the world has revealed, there seems to be no end to Dylan’s borrowings, inspirations, thefts, appropriations or whatever you want to call them. Scraps of blues lyrics and folksongs, the entire melody of a Billie Holiday song, nursery rhymes, the violin riff and melody from a romantic ballad recorded by Bing Crosby and others in the 1930’s; hackneyed jokes; lines from various novels and, most unexpectedly, extensive and, needless to say, uncredited ‘borrowings’ from Confessions of a Yakuza by the Japanese author, Junichi Saga, all became grist to his voracious mill. Earlier on, I referred to my own symptoms. On “Love and Theft” Bob Dylan seems to be suffering from an acute dose of a Textually Transmitted Disease (TTD), a malady that comes dangerously close to plagiarism.
A few extra words on the subject of plagiarism might not be out of place here. We would all love our heroes to create ab nihilo in the burning forge of genius etc. etc., but that's simply not the way it works. When it comes to his sources, Dylan is as much of a magpie as, say, that man Joyce again (who ransacked everything and anything from Aesop to Zarathustra), but, for me, the problem is that he is so lazy with his pilfering. Unlike Joyce, who transmutes what he pilfers into something new and wonderful on the page, Dylan imports his spoils wholesale and seems content to leave them there with little or no connection to anything else in the same song. This wasn’t such an issue in his earlier work, but that’s something I’ll return to in my comments on Nettie Moore below.
But, but… – and this is a massive ‘but’ – in live performance he takes the recorded blueprints by the scruff of the neck and, by dint of miraculous phrasing, outrageous inflection, in short, sheer vocal genius, twists and turns, cajoles and forces them into vibrant, sinuous, mesmeric works of art. To coin a cliché: The stage is to Dylan as the page was to Joyce and it is on stage that, I believe, his true greatness lies. And having said that, I still wish to God he wouldn't steal so much. I think that the practice diminishes his art and I fear that historians, particularly those who have never heard recordings of his live performances – I’ve just had a sudden flash of a Nobel Prize Committee gathered around a table, confronted by mounds of bootleg recordings – will consign him to the lower ranks of artistic achievement. But, then again, why should we worry about posterity when, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, it has never done anything for us?
**** Given Dylan’s love of old music (as his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, abundantly illustrates), it comes as no great shock to find that the title Modern Times is deeply ironic and there’s not a genre here less that half-a-century old. In fact, I won’t be at all surprised if your first reaction is ‘Where have I hear that bit before?’ And if you have more than a nodding acquaintance with the blues and the history of popular music, you probably have heard much of Modern Times before. There’s been a lot of Internet talk about how it and “Love and Theft” represent some sort of repository of American musical culture; how brilliantly Dylan has drawn on the sentimental melodies he heard as a child and, later on, blues pulsing up from stations south of Minnesota, and presented us with a fond tribute to his musical forbears. Listening to some Dylan apologists, you’d be forgiven for forming the impression that “Love and Theft” and Modern Times are more sacred, historical artifacts than living, breathing works of art to be enjoyed, loved, disliked, talked about and argued over. Of course it’s good that Bob Dylan recognises where he has come from – something he’s known from way back, incidentally, and doesn’t need to prove to anyone – but that, per se, is no reason why any album by him, or anyone else for that matter, should be glorified. Take Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, for instance. Of course, it’s of Monumental Significance, Seminal Importance, Incalculable Influence etc., etc., etc., but if it didn’t portray such a vast range of human behaviour; the joys, the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to (Allusion or Theft? Discuss.) and if we, in turn, weren’t moved and changed by the listening experience, it would, so to speak, have no business stirring outside the doors of the Smithsonian.
Before I get off my soapbox, I’ll mention something else that irks me about TWIB. Too often I have found that if you express anything less that utter admiration for an album, you will be told (a) that “you just don’t get it” (b) you haven’t listened to it enough, that it’s a grower, give it more time…. If you reply that, on the contrary, you’ve been living with it for months, you’ll be told (c) Whoa, give it break for a while, you’ll really love it when you come back.. So, poor doubting Thomas just can’t win. Which raises a subsidiary question I’ve always found interesting: How many times must a fan lend an ear till he knows that an album is great? (It’s alright, Ma, it’s only an allusion). Seriously though, at what stage does familiarity breed mere familiarity, a sort of cosy recognition that is easily mistaken for liking, even loving a song? Is it possible to hold a definitive opinion of any work of art? In spite of all my pronouncements here, I don’t think it is. Do I contradict myself? With apologies to Walt Whitman, very well then I contradict myself. And, having got all that off my chest, let’s, at last, turn our attention to Modern Times.
Things get off to a flying start with Thunder on the Mountain. There’s nothing remotely original about its 12-bar rockabilly structure and melodic echoes of Johnny B. Goode, but Dylan’s vocals are absolutely outstanding. The savage indignation in the way he attacks
“Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes
I’ll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams.”
never fails to move me and provides the first of the album’s Great Moments. This song is one of the very few that doesn’t outstay its welcome and its dozen verses – apart from a baffling reference to Alicia Keys – contain some great writing. Consider, for instance, this arresting blend of the sinister and amusing.
“Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches/I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages.”
The first time I heard that, the beginnings of a smile were swept away by memories of news reports from Burma, Sri Lanka or Uganda: every time I’ve played it since, I see those young shoulders weighed down by bandoliers, the defiant stares unable to kill the childhood in their eyes.
Next up is Spirit on the Water, a woefully protracted piece (twenty quatrains!) which, despite its biblical opening and subsequent blues borrowings, is a middle-of-the-road ditty in which romantic Bob finds twenty ways of saying “I’m wild about you, gal.” The lyrics are exactly what you’d expect from this genre, but even his heartfelt vocals – listen to the resignation he brings to the eighth verse – can do nothing for lines like
I been in a brawl/ Now I’m feeling the wall
I’m going away, baby/I won’t be back till fall.
Did Bob Dylan really write that? One redeeming feature though: if you stick around, you’ll eventually reach a lovely coda for harmonica and guitar.
It’s with the next track Rollin’ and Tumblin’ that all my tidy opinions, all my logical conclusions are blown right out the window and I’m simply overwhelmed by what I’m hearing. Again, there’s nothing original here: the melody and the opening lines have been around since, as my mother used to say, Oul’ God’s time. Hambone Willie Newbern recorded it in 1929, and it has subsequently been pressed into action by Muddy Waters, Canned Heat, The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart, to name but a handful. The liner notes say ‘All songs by Bob Dylan’ but only the lyric here is really his. And, for once, I don’t care. I just don’t care. I love the stinging guitar intro, what sounds like a pizzicato fiddle but is probably guitar chords, and some great lyrics:
“The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom.
I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumbling tombs.”
From the mouth of anyone else, these lines would be no more than gothic histrionics, but into them Dylan distills a veritable universe of mortality and loss. And it is his magisterial growl that presides over the track. Listen, for instance, to the self-loathing in the last word of verse seven, or the terror he evokes with the last four words of the next verse. Or, best of all, the way his voice soars into the very opening words of the song. This is Bob Dylan singing like only Bob Dylan can, and the shivers up my spine let me know that this is the album’s second Great Moment. Hearing singing as good as this sometimes fills me with dread at how short is our time on earth…. My brain tells me that, at nearly six minutes, the whole shebang is far is too long, but, again, I don’t care, and it is the one song on Modern Times I can’t wait to hear live. Why do I like this one so much and not others? I have no idea. As Van Morrison testified all those years ago on Summertime in England, “It ain’t why, why, why. It just is.…”
Then, from these sublime heights we fall headlong into When the Deal Goes Down, a beautifully-sung mishmash of Victorian poeticisms and well-meaning platitudes on the transience of life. (It is actually enhanced by the evocative video, one of the very few instances I can recall where a song is thus improved, and the reason is obvious: the pictures distract from the words.) By the way, those of you who enjoy spotting arcane correspondences in Dylan’s music might like to compare the drumbeat that starts Like A Rolling Stone with its more anaemic counterpart here.
Shortly after the album’s release, an American disc jockey, Scott Warmuth, googled the lyrics and found that its romantic references to frail flowers, precious hours, moonlight, visions in the skies etc. weren’t written by Dylan at all, but lifted more or less wholesale from various poems by Henry Timrod (1828-1867), a Charleston native who currently joins Dylan in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. But I’d wager that Mr Timrod would turn in his grave if he knew that his words had ended up alongside some of the other lines here. Consider, for instance:
The moon gives light and it shines by night
and
Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes.
Again, I ask you, did Bob Dylan really write that?
Despite the great singing – listen, particularly, to the dismissive emphasis he places on that nothing in line five – Someday Baby is an inconsequential piece of work, nine verses crying out for a middle-eight and a fiddle or mandolin solo instead of the run-of the mill guitars. Inspired, I have been informed, by Muddy Waters’ Trouble No More, this track comes across like J.J. Cale in one of his less somnolent moments but, after a few listens, its copy-and-paste guitar figure is guaranteed to lull anybody straight into the arms of Morpheus.
Workingman's Blues #2 is already a particular favourite of many Dylan fans, but I find its mixture of anthemic love song, rural and urban imagery, blues references, and incongruous political observation somewhat less than convincing. And, again, its mention of ‘a lover’s breath’ and ‘a temporary death’ are straight from Mr Timrod. But it’s not all bad news: I love the evocative “Starlight by the edge of the creek” and the pathos he brings to something as simple as
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me.
Beyond the Horizon is a gush of sentimentality that blatantly rips off the melody of the well-known Red Sails in the Sunset. If Hallmark ever runs out of soppy sentiments, this song will prove to be its saviour. The shadow of Timrod is again discernible in the second half of this quatrain:
My wretched heart’s pounding
I felt an angel’s kiss
My memories are drowning
In mortal bliss
but did Dylan himself really resort to “an angel’s kiss” and, elsewhere in the song, such threadbare clichés as “I’ll build my world around you?” and “I’ve got more than a lifetime to live loving you.” If so, how the mighty have fallen.
Nettie Moore – part of whose chorus is taken directly from a nineteenth-century song with the same title – is ostensibly an elegiac love song, but what is “Well, the world of research has gone berserk/Too much paperwork” doing in the middle of it? Or what’s the story with the judge? On a similar note, has anyone figured out what the narrator being “hit from behind” has to do with anything else in Ain’t Talking? Non-sequiturs, have, of course, always figured prominently in Dylan’s work, but the difference is that, unlike the earlier surreal flashes that detonated whole series of images in your head, here they are such damp squibs that even Dylan’s singing can’t ignite them.
Musically, this could have been the most interesting track – That G major chord in the second line gives a refreshing jolt to each verse, but when you hear it for the tenth or twelfth time, it soon loses its impact – but much of its potency has disappeared before we get anywhere near the end of its almost seven minutes. At the risk of being burned as a heretic by the Torquemadas of the Dylan world, can I dare suggest that this would be a far better song if he had scrapped half the choruses and verses 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Yes, I know there’ll be very little left, but, to paraphrase a line from another Dylan song, the fibreglass would be disposed of and only the gems remain.
Typically, Dylan claims complete credit for The Levee’s Gonna Break but, despite its mostly new lyric, it still owes a substantial debt to When the Levee Breaks recorded by Memphis Minnie Kansas Joe McCoy and his wife Memphis Minnie in 1929. Led Zeppelin fans will also be familiar with an epic version of the song (which, I might note, does share credits with the original writers) but Dylan’s is a repetitious 16-verse saga that might get us jivin’ in the aisles at concerts, but as a listening experience, really tested my endurance.
And so we come to the final track. Ain’t Talking is nine minutes long but, as far as I’m concerned, that’s as near as it gets to being any sort of epic. The lyrics, which embrace bits and pieces from dozens of other songs – including, incidentally, Wild Mountain Thyme which Dylan massacred at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival – range from the interesting
I practise a faith that’s been long abandoned
Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road
To the apparently trite
Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’.
Eatin’ hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town
Despite the subtle mix of acoustic and electric guitars, the music is mainly a two-chord construction that seems to go on forever and the Picardy third which finally brings things to a close is as welcome as the flowers in May. Honest to God, this should have been edited with a chainsaw.
And there you have it. Today, October 16, 2006, – Who knows how I’ll feel in a year’s time? – Modern Times is tediously protracted, derivative, melodically flat, and for the most part, lyrically banal. The arrangements are equally unimaginative and played by musicians (the guitarists especially) who seldom rise above the sort of stuff you'd expect from any competent covers band. But as someone rightly pointed out to me, this is not necessarily their fault. What they are playing obviously pleases their boss because, as is well known, Dylan is merciless when disposing of band members who, for whatever reason, fail to meet with his approval.
It is the singing that provides the album's only consistent redeeming feature because, for the most part, Modern Times is an easy-listening, middle-of-the road, blues-by-numbers collection which, if it wasn't by Bob Dylan, I would never have given a third or fourth listen. And maybe it’s those precise traits that account for the album’s popularity. It is Dylan's first Number 1 in the US since 1976 – he is, incidentally, the oldest living person ever to have an album enter the Billboard charts at the highest position – and has been a huge hit all around the world. It has been equally well-received by the critics (One website that monitors reviews gives the album’s approval rating at nearly 90 per cent), so what do I know? All I do know for certain is that, most of the time, Modern Times does not move me at all. I also know that, more than forty years ago, Dylan wrote that he not busy being born is busy dying. In terms of the creativity evident on Modern Times, I can’t stop that phrase from ringing in my head.
But before I go any further, let me tell you where I’m coming from. Though I suspect that my family might call me something else, I would describe myself simply as a big Bob Dylan fan, . I have all the official albums, hundreds of bootlegs, scores of books, fanzines and DVDs. I go to as many of his concerts as I possibly can; I am familiar with many of his musical antecedents; I know a fair bit about his family origins, and hardly a day goes by but I think of some aspect of his life or work. But one affliction I hope I don’t suffer from is blind devotion. Unlike many Dylanologists (How I dislike that word, but at least it beats Bobcats and Dylanophiles, not to mention a species I’ve actually been addressed as – Hi Bobaroo! – but thankfully never encountered in the flesh) for whom everything Dylan does is absolutely perfect, I am the first to admit that no artist is flawless, and that sometimes – too often on recent albums – Bob Dylan most definitely has shown the proverbial feet of clay.
My involvement with Dylan’s music goes back a long time. I have a vivid memory of being perched on the dinner table – my folk-club stool – pretending not to watch myself in the kitchen mirror as I murder Blowin’ in the Wind. I can see my sunburst Egmond (bought the previous Christmas for one pound, seventeen and six); I can feel the strings an inch above the fretboard, my D, G and A painfully prised from Bert Weedon’s Play in a Day. When I’d finally mastered the three-chord-trick, I remember daydreaming about all the songs I was going to write – JD’s Dream, Talkin’ Coote Street Blues, The Lonesome Life of Bridgie Farrell – but, thankfully, none of them – as James Joyce said about a story he had once tried to write – ever got “any forrader than the title”.
Over the next few years I immersed myself in Irish and English traditional music. In college, I played mostly Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon – the ladies weren’t too impressed by The Verdant Braes of Skreen – but, with a clarity that is luminous, I can recall one Major Dylan Moment when B. P. Fallon, an Irish DJ later half-famous for appearing on Top of the Pops with John Lennon, played the just-released Nashville Skyline from start to finish; a few of us huddled around the transistor, horrified by the voice crooning through the static; our reaction presaging Greil Marcus’ notorious response to a later Dylan album: What is this shit?
Blood on the Tracks reignited my interest – I remember staying up late to work out the open tuning; the small-hours silence broken by my brand-new Yamaha FG180 – but when he found Jesus in the late 1970’s I abandoned Bob Dylan again. The slick production on Slow Train Coming really turned me off but, as I discovered many years later when the Internet introduced me to the vast new world of bootlegs, the live performance of those religious songs inspired some of his all-time greatest singing. Although I liked bits and pieces from the 1980’s – I and I and Most of the Time remain firm favourites – it wasn’t until the late 1990’s that I really got back into Dylan – the Internet played a large part in this – and, with the zeal of the ‘re-converted’, I listened to everything, attended as many live concerts as I could; read more esoteric stuff than was good for anyone’s health…
So, why have I given you this potted history of my adventures in the realms of Dylanology? Primarily because I love writing about anything to do with music but, on a more subliminal level, I suspect that it has something to do with establishing my credentials as an informed fan, someone who’s entitled and qualified to be as critical as he feels.
Such borrowings, inspirations, thefts, appropriations or whatever you want to call them are usually defended by Those Who Idolise Bob (TWIB) by (a) calling them 'allusions' (b) referring to 'the folk process' (c) Quoting T. S. Eliot. Let’s examine each of these. (a) There is a world of difference between allusion and downright pilfering. The former is an implied or indirect reference. For example, the yellow dressing-gown worn by Buck Mulligan in the opening lines of Joyce's Ulysses – a veritable cornucopia of allusion – alludes to the portrayal of Judas in Christian Symbolism, thereby reinforcing our impression of Stephen Dedalus' opinion of Mulligan. That's an allusion. Another definition of which might be: A word or phrase that amplifies what actually appears on the pages, a verbal incendiary device, if you like, that explodes in your head with a hundred possibilities. But there is nothing allusive about changing a word or line or two in someone else's work and calling it your own.
(Before I go any further, I think I should say something about my already apparent obsession with James Joyce, and also the reference to TWIB above. The two constants, the presiding deities, so to speak, in my cultural life are Bob Dylan and James Joyce, and, most days, something to do with one or the other comes into my head without knocking. Get a life, clear your head, I hear you snigger and maybe you’re right.)
As if it were an article of faith, TWIB steadfastly maintain that Bob Dylan is capable of doing no wrong. Think Papal infallibility for Catholics. Apart from such extreme opinions, TWIB are also capable of behaviour that might be considered unusual. I have met various members of the tribe who listen to absolutely nothing except Bob Dylan’s music; I know someone who has a huge library of books about Dylan and has never opened a page of any of them. I know someone else who has a roomful of bootlegs, but has never listened to the original Blood on the Tracks and has no desire to. Instead, the experience is being saved for some Profound Moment, some Grand Epiphany when, no doubt, the mystery of life, which came first, the chicken or the egg, how much is the doggy in the window, will all be revealed.
Anyway, back to (b) above. For almost a century now, in the so-called developed world, there has been no such thing as 'the folk process'. Before the introduction of mechanical recording, and subsequent means of mass communication, such a process, based on oral composition, oral transmission and the fallibility of human memory, did obviously exist, but this is no longer the case. If we accept that the sine qua non of ‘the folk process’ is oral composition and transmission, then, in terms of composition, Bob Dylan never was a folk artist. It’s as simple as that. He may, of course, pace our coffee-house friend in Talkin’ New York, have been a folk singer, but that’s another day’s work.
T.S Eliot’s comment – in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism – that immature poets imitate; mature poets steal, is often trotted out by TWIB as a justification for Dylan’s ‘borrowings’. But what isn’t so freely broadcast is that, in the same paragraph, Eliot also says that “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.” To my mind, it is that final clause that is applicable to much of Dylan’s recent work.
The liner notes of the archly-titled “Love and Theft” album of 2001 proclaim that all songs are written by Bob Dylan. Needless to say, there is absolutely no acknowledgement of the disparate sources he has plundered to write these songs. For example, the very first notes you’ll hear are a direct lift from Uncle John’s Bongos by country duo Johnnie and Jack from 1961. And so it goes, right through the album…. As diligent research by fans all over the world has revealed, there seems to be no end to Dylan’s borrowings, inspirations, thefts, appropriations or whatever you want to call them. Scraps of blues lyrics and folksongs, the entire melody of a Billie Holiday song, nursery rhymes, the violin riff and melody from a romantic ballad recorded by Bing Crosby and others in the 1930’s; hackneyed jokes; lines from various novels and, most unexpectedly, extensive and, needless to say, uncredited ‘borrowings’ from Confessions of a Yakuza by the Japanese author, Junichi Saga, all became grist to his voracious mill. Earlier on, I referred to my own symptoms. On “Love and Theft” Bob Dylan seems to be suffering from an acute dose of a Textually Transmitted Disease (TTD), a malady that comes dangerously close to plagiarism.
A few extra words on the subject of plagiarism might not be out of place here. We would all love our heroes to create ab nihilo in the burning forge of genius etc. etc., but that's simply not the way it works. When it comes to his sources, Dylan is as much of a magpie as, say, that man Joyce again (who ransacked everything and anything from Aesop to Zarathustra), but, for me, the problem is that he is so lazy with his pilfering. Unlike Joyce, who transmutes what he pilfers into something new and wonderful on the page, Dylan imports his spoils wholesale and seems content to leave them there with little or no connection to anything else in the same song. This wasn’t such an issue in his earlier work, but that’s something I’ll return to in my comments on Nettie Moore below.
But, but… – and this is a massive ‘but’ – in live performance he takes the recorded blueprints by the scruff of the neck and, by dint of miraculous phrasing, outrageous inflection, in short, sheer vocal genius, twists and turns, cajoles and forces them into vibrant, sinuous, mesmeric works of art. To coin a cliché: The stage is to Dylan as the page was to Joyce and it is on stage that, I believe, his true greatness lies. And having said that, I still wish to God he wouldn't steal so much. I think that the practice diminishes his art and I fear that historians, particularly those who have never heard recordings of his live performances – I’ve just had a sudden flash of a Nobel Prize Committee gathered around a table, confronted by mounds of bootleg recordings – will consign him to the lower ranks of artistic achievement. But, then again, why should we worry about posterity when, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, it has never done anything for us?
Before I get off my soapbox, I’ll mention something else that irks me about TWIB. Too often I have found that if you express anything less that utter admiration for an album, you will be told (a) that “you just don’t get it” (b) you haven’t listened to it enough, that it’s a grower, give it more time…. If you reply that, on the contrary, you’ve been living with it for months, you’ll be told (c) Whoa, give it break for a while, you’ll really love it when you come back.. So, poor doubting Thomas just can’t win. Which raises a subsidiary question I’ve always found interesting: How many times must a fan lend an ear till he knows that an album is great? (It’s alright, Ma, it’s only an allusion). Seriously though, at what stage does familiarity breed mere familiarity, a sort of cosy recognition that is easily mistaken for liking, even loving a song? Is it possible to hold a definitive opinion of any work of art? In spite of all my pronouncements here, I don’t think it is. Do I contradict myself? With apologies to Walt Whitman, very well then I contradict myself. And, having got all that off my chest, let’s, at last, turn our attention to Modern Times.
Things get off to a flying start with Thunder on the Mountain. There’s nothing remotely original about its 12-bar rockabilly structure and melodic echoes of Johnny B. Goode, but Dylan’s vocals are absolutely outstanding. The savage indignation in the way he attacks
“Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes
I’ll say this, I don’t give a damn about your dreams.”
never fails to move me and provides the first of the album’s Great Moments. This song is one of the very few that doesn’t outstay its welcome and its dozen verses – apart from a baffling reference to Alicia Keys – contain some great writing. Consider, for instance, this arresting blend of the sinister and amusing.
“Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches/I’ll recruit my army from the orphanages.”
The first time I heard that, the beginnings of a smile were swept away by memories of news reports from Burma, Sri Lanka or Uganda: every time I’ve played it since, I see those young shoulders weighed down by bandoliers, the defiant stares unable to kill the childhood in their eyes.
Next up is Spirit on the Water, a woefully protracted piece (twenty quatrains!) which, despite its biblical opening and subsequent blues borrowings, is a middle-of-the-road ditty in which romantic Bob finds twenty ways of saying “I’m wild about you, gal.” The lyrics are exactly what you’d expect from this genre, but even his heartfelt vocals – listen to the resignation he brings to the eighth verse – can do nothing for lines like
I been in a brawl/ Now I’m feeling the wall
I’m going away, baby/I won’t be back till fall.
Did Bob Dylan really write that? One redeeming feature though: if you stick around, you’ll eventually reach a lovely coda for harmonica and guitar.
It’s with the next track Rollin’ and Tumblin’ that all my tidy opinions, all my logical conclusions are blown right out the window and I’m simply overwhelmed by what I’m hearing. Again, there’s nothing original here: the melody and the opening lines have been around since, as my mother used to say, Oul’ God’s time. Hambone Willie Newbern recorded it in 1929, and it has subsequently been pressed into action by Muddy Waters, Canned Heat, The Grateful Dead and Captain Beefheart, to name but a handful. The liner notes say ‘All songs by Bob Dylan’ but only the lyric here is really his. And, for once, I don’t care. I just don’t care. I love the stinging guitar intro, what sounds like a pizzicato fiddle but is probably guitar chords, and some great lyrics:
“The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom.
I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumbling tombs.”
From the mouth of anyone else, these lines would be no more than gothic histrionics, but into them Dylan distills a veritable universe of mortality and loss. And it is his magisterial growl that presides over the track. Listen, for instance, to the self-loathing in the last word of verse seven, or the terror he evokes with the last four words of the next verse. Or, best of all, the way his voice soars into the very opening words of the song. This is Bob Dylan singing like only Bob Dylan can, and the shivers up my spine let me know that this is the album’s second Great Moment. Hearing singing as good as this sometimes fills me with dread at how short is our time on earth…. My brain tells me that, at nearly six minutes, the whole shebang is far is too long, but, again, I don’t care, and it is the one song on Modern Times I can’t wait to hear live. Why do I like this one so much and not others? I have no idea. As Van Morrison testified all those years ago on Summertime in England, “It ain’t why, why, why. It just is.…”
Then, from these sublime heights we fall headlong into When the Deal Goes Down, a beautifully-sung mishmash of Victorian poeticisms and well-meaning platitudes on the transience of life. (It is actually enhanced by the evocative video, one of the very few instances I can recall where a song is thus improved, and the reason is obvious: the pictures distract from the words.) By the way, those of you who enjoy spotting arcane correspondences in Dylan’s music might like to compare the drumbeat that starts Like A Rolling Stone with its more anaemic counterpart here.
Shortly after the album’s release, an American disc jockey, Scott Warmuth, googled the lyrics and found that its romantic references to frail flowers, precious hours, moonlight, visions in the skies etc. weren’t written by Dylan at all, but lifted more or less wholesale from various poems by Henry Timrod (1828-1867), a Charleston native who currently joins Dylan in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. But I’d wager that Mr Timrod would turn in his grave if he knew that his words had ended up alongside some of the other lines here. Consider, for instance:
The moon gives light and it shines by night
and
Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes.
Again, I ask you, did Bob Dylan really write that?
Despite the great singing – listen, particularly, to the dismissive emphasis he places on that nothing in line five – Someday Baby is an inconsequential piece of work, nine verses crying out for a middle-eight and a fiddle or mandolin solo instead of the run-of the mill guitars. Inspired, I have been informed, by Muddy Waters’ Trouble No More, this track comes across like J.J. Cale in one of his less somnolent moments but, after a few listens, its copy-and-paste guitar figure is guaranteed to lull anybody straight into the arms of Morpheus.
Workingman's Blues #2 is already a particular favourite of many Dylan fans, but I find its mixture of anthemic love song, rural and urban imagery, blues references, and incongruous political observation somewhat less than convincing. And, again, its mention of ‘a lover’s breath’ and ‘a temporary death’ are straight from Mr Timrod. But it’s not all bad news: I love the evocative “Starlight by the edge of the creek” and the pathos he brings to something as simple as
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me.
Beyond the Horizon is a gush of sentimentality that blatantly rips off the melody of the well-known Red Sails in the Sunset. If Hallmark ever runs out of soppy sentiments, this song will prove to be its saviour. The shadow of Timrod is again discernible in the second half of this quatrain:
My wretched heart’s pounding
I felt an angel’s kiss
My memories are drowning
In mortal bliss
but did Dylan himself really resort to “an angel’s kiss” and, elsewhere in the song, such threadbare clichés as “I’ll build my world around you?” and “I’ve got more than a lifetime to live loving you.” If so, how the mighty have fallen.
Nettie Moore – part of whose chorus is taken directly from a nineteenth-century song with the same title – is ostensibly an elegiac love song, but what is “Well, the world of research has gone berserk/Too much paperwork” doing in the middle of it? Or what’s the story with the judge? On a similar note, has anyone figured out what the narrator being “hit from behind” has to do with anything else in Ain’t Talking? Non-sequiturs, have, of course, always figured prominently in Dylan’s work, but the difference is that, unlike the earlier surreal flashes that detonated whole series of images in your head, here they are such damp squibs that even Dylan’s singing can’t ignite them.
Musically, this could have been the most interesting track – That G major chord in the second line gives a refreshing jolt to each verse, but when you hear it for the tenth or twelfth time, it soon loses its impact – but much of its potency has disappeared before we get anywhere near the end of its almost seven minutes. At the risk of being burned as a heretic by the Torquemadas of the Dylan world, can I dare suggest that this would be a far better song if he had scrapped half the choruses and verses 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Yes, I know there’ll be very little left, but, to paraphrase a line from another Dylan song, the fibreglass would be disposed of and only the gems remain.
Typically, Dylan claims complete credit for The Levee’s Gonna Break but, despite its mostly new lyric, it still owes a substantial debt to When the Levee Breaks recorded by Memphis Minnie Kansas Joe McCoy and his wife Memphis Minnie in 1929. Led Zeppelin fans will also be familiar with an epic version of the song (which, I might note, does share credits with the original writers) but Dylan’s is a repetitious 16-verse saga that might get us jivin’ in the aisles at concerts, but as a listening experience, really tested my endurance.
And so we come to the final track. Ain’t Talking is nine minutes long but, as far as I’m concerned, that’s as near as it gets to being any sort of epic. The lyrics, which embrace bits and pieces from dozens of other songs – including, incidentally, Wild Mountain Thyme which Dylan massacred at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival – range from the interesting
I practise a faith that’s been long abandoned
Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road
To the apparently trite
Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’.
Eatin’ hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town
Despite the subtle mix of acoustic and electric guitars, the music is mainly a two-chord construction that seems to go on forever and the Picardy third which finally brings things to a close is as welcome as the flowers in May. Honest to God, this should have been edited with a chainsaw.
And there you have it. Today, October 16, 2006, – Who knows how I’ll feel in a year’s time? – Modern Times is tediously protracted, derivative, melodically flat, and for the most part, lyrically banal. The arrangements are equally unimaginative and played by musicians (the guitarists especially) who seldom rise above the sort of stuff you'd expect from any competent covers band. But as someone rightly pointed out to me, this is not necessarily their fault. What they are playing obviously pleases their boss because, as is well known, Dylan is merciless when disposing of band members who, for whatever reason, fail to meet with his approval.
It is the singing that provides the album's only consistent redeeming feature because, for the most part, Modern Times is an easy-listening, middle-of-the road, blues-by-numbers collection which, if it wasn't by Bob Dylan, I would never have given a third or fourth listen. And maybe it’s those precise traits that account for the album’s popularity. It is Dylan's first Number 1 in the US since 1976 – he is, incidentally, the oldest living person ever to have an album enter the Billboard charts at the highest position – and has been a huge hit all around the world. It has been equally well-received by the critics (One website that monitors reviews gives the album’s approval rating at nearly 90 per cent), so what do I know? All I do know for certain is that, most of the time, Modern Times does not move me at all. I also know that, more than forty years ago, Dylan wrote that he not busy being born is busy dying. In terms of the creativity evident on Modern Times, I can’t stop that phrase from ringing in my head.
posted by Superannuated Man at 8:52 pm
30 Comments:
I enjoyed your aritcle although I don't agree with you about "Just Talking", the last song on the new release. I think it's one of the best songs he's ever written.
I interpret the line "someone hit me from behind" as the moment a life starts (as when a baby is hit from behind at birth). The mystic's life (no one on earth will ever know) goes on from there...
Dave Weissbrod
Its your loss that you just don't get it.
Never mind.
You miss the key fact that this album has the repeat playability of "Nashville Skyline" in that excellent musical accompaniment is matched by terrific lyric phrasing by Dylan.
You've allowed your histrical mental picture of Dylan the Poet to block your entry into this "sea-change into something rich and strange(Shakespeare)."
Dennis Flaherty
Thanks for some very enjoyable reading. Somewhere inside Dylan hides a gifted poet - the hand that wrote Desolation Row clearly knew what it was about. But he seems now more than ever utterly dismissive of his gift. Songs like Workingman's Blues read to me like first drafts, five minute affairs knocked out then not worked on at all. A bit more polish and, as you say, a touch of pruning, would improve him no end. Either he's lazy or (more like) deliberately obtuse - for his relationship with "fame" (thus recognition) was ever perverse. You quote a phrase likely to have had Timrod turning in his grave. How about "more frailer than the flowers"? Even assuming a genuine mistake in the singing, why should any self-respecting wordsmith leave that be - in his own name, never mind a deceased someone else's?
As for Beyond The Horizon, though, I think there's more to the song than you claim. It's sardonic, very tongue-in-cheek. It paints a saccharine smaltzy picture of life "beyond the horizon" i.e. in never-never land - so it's a wry Dream On, People, calling out the listeners' hopeless hopes and schemes again, as in Thunder On The Mountain, onlt this time considerably more obliquely. As for "hit me from behind" - isn't it just a reference (an allusion?) to the nature of his enemy (the ones we hear more of in subsequent lines): dirty sneaky, attack from behind, won't show their face, won't fight like a man...?
I have to say I like the album, but then, where Bob's concerned, I'm very easily pleased.
Thanks again
Jim
Well, look, everyone is very welcome to her own opinion. And one man's meat is another's poison. But what is the point of all those words when all you are really saying is 'I don't like this disc'? Nobody cares. And, as somebody said years ago, you're over-intellectualising. It's just a record.
And another thing...
Isn't the Clancy's rousing 'Fine Girl You Are' in fact the last line of the chorus from 'The Holy Ground' and thus nothing whatever to do with 'The Leaving of Liverpool'?
And a final thing [for Jim]...
'How about "more frailer than the flowers" '? Jim asks.
He's not the only writer to use double comparatives/superlatives deliberately, the better to emphasise his meaning, Jim. Remember Brutus and 'this was the most unkindest cut of all'?
I think a bloke called Bill Something-or-Other wrote that didn't he?
I agree with just about everything you said. But somehow I love this record; can't stop listening. Sorry!
"Its your loss that you just don't get it.
Never mind.
6:27 PM "
..Which reminds me of one of the primary TWIB responses that you forgot--"you just don't get it."
--Liana Markley
Bob mentioned he wrote MT in a kind of hypnotic state. The songs are long..but he was asked once about shortening Highlands and said "that is the short version?"
Although i like MT and enjoy most songs without disecting them too much...the music is his art...but what of his life?
Half a century of being poked and prodded by himself and anyone with a stick.
Is that why he only has to be Bob Dyaln when he has to be and the rest of the time he might just be himself.
Maybe the "himself" would like to write a song called "Get lost from my loss"? or
"My 1st song and BD`s 2115th"...
it would be dreadful to be him or BD!
He refers to his view of the world regularly as "surreal" and i`m surprised he`s not psychotic from being everything to everyone looking at him...and BD.. i would be!
No wonder BD keeps dredging words and tunes past to sing a song in BD`s future. To try anything new might get too close to the "himself" intended and remains unheard.
Remember he said "anything i write or sing that i have to explain is just more pressure" and that was decades ago...and he would be clearer now about "what BD writes and sings"
Of course MT gives us what we want because you can`t pick another 10 songs..like they`re lollies and we want to go back in and change a couple. Most of us suck sweet and sour everlasting gob stoppers and concentrate on the sweet..
One day the taste will be gone and so will Bob Dylan...and himself.
What would be great is hear the songs he writes and sings that BD has nothing to do with..where he says..i won`t give BD that or anyone else.. that`s my song i can play to myself.
For PT,
Yes, you're dead right about 'The Holy Ground'. My mistake.
I think this is the one of the best pieces I've ever read about Bob Dylan. Sometimes the Emperor has, indeed, no clothes at all. And TWIB.... I like that.... they're even on the defensive here already. Sad lot. Well done superannuated man.
there is nothing new under the sun, or something like that. that line was no doubt well known when the ecclesiastes writer pilfered it.
While it's true that Bob lifts from infinite sources it is also true that he leads people to those sources when, otherwise, they would never know or care about them. All great artists do this. Period. Modern Times is a really commercial album and that is not, in itself, a crime. Yet, it is his best singing since the early days, much better than Love and Theft. It is also a very comic record with a dangerous sense of absurdity lurking behind every hopeful phrase. Bob dosen't CHOOSE what he hears in his head. He just shares it.
at 65 he could be playing Bingo at the Firehall... he is out touring with his pals and looks to be having a fun time, I saw him on Aug 20, 2006, I'll never forget it, ... he is now premiering the new MT songs on tour and in several years will probably give them a "once over" as he has done with the older songs. Maybe he should have had extensive liner notes, as he did on "World Gone Wrong" (go read those on his web site if you don't have the cd) but I don't fault him for performing, writing and singing at the level he is, even if he doesn't measure up on your measuring stick. Which has a pointy end. jab jab. I was grateful to have the new cd and I enjoy it. I don't know what a Picardy Third is tho. so sue me.
How about the fact that the album cover is the same as a cover by the band 'Luna' released in 1995?
While I love Modern Times, I don't think it's anywhere near as good as "Love and Theft." Excellent insights, nonetheless. I enjoy Spirit in the Water by the way, it floats by and takes its time, just like a spirit in the water. For sharp commentary on Dylan and other worthy artists, please visit my site Rock Turtleneck:
http://rockturtleneck.blogspot.com/
Anyone ever tell you how smug you sound?
The following excerpt from Luc Sante's review of Chronicles in the New York Review of Books some time back hits a few similar nails on the head to yourself in your piece on Dylan as a poet.
"Blood on the Tracks (1974) is cited by many as their favorite Dylan record—Studio A reprints Rick Moody's moving, breathless pledge of allegiance to it, in which he calls it "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape." It is, to be sure, quite an achievement, with a wealth of lived experience in its dense, intricately plotted songs. And yet, in comparison to the songs on Blonde on Blonde or The Basement Tapes, which are genuine, sphinx-like, irreducible, hard-shell poems whether or not the words can ever be usefully divorced from the music, such numbers as "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Idiot Wind" are prose. They are driven by their narratives, and their imagery is determined by its function:
I ran into the fortune-teller, who said beware of lightning that might strike
I haven't known peace and quiet for so long I can't remember what it's like
There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door
You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the wars
After losin' every battle.
The smoke issuing from the boxcar door, which is there only to fill out the line and supply an end rhyme, does come out of nowhere, but everything else seems cooked—the palmist is from central casting and her warning is generic; the soldier on the cross is on loan from an anti-war poster (he seems to be wearing a gas mask); the connecting lines are rhetorical and flat; it could, after all, be a lie. This is not to say that the song is bad, merely purpose-driven, with every verse hastening us along to the point, which is "We're idiots, babe/It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves." And that, in turn, is a great line from a note left on a pillow at dawn. Nothing on Blood on the Tracks hobbles in on crutches or speaks to the future or appears on the wall in letters of fire. It is a brilliant account of the vicissitudes of a love affair, an exemplary specimen of the confessional culture of the period, a remarkable work of emotional intelligence. It is so many people's favorite Dylan album in large part because it is the one that people can imagine themselves creating, were the muse to tap them on the forehead with a nine-pound hammer."
It would be a good thing if most Dylan commentators and fans hadn't been struck by hammers of various weights themselves in their time . . .
By the way, I seem to remember smoke pouring out of a boxcar door in Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha and maybe even a crucified figure in same.But then again, Dylan appears to like the movies almost as much as them mean old blues he plunders.
I share your apostasy on the recent albums, Modern Times in particular.The vocals are stronger and subtler than one might expect but such writing as may be identified as Dylan's is largely trite or worse as you accurately point out.Poor self - pastiche, in fact . . . All been done before, all been written in the book . . . But magnificently so first time around . . .
Watch out for the slings and arrows of outraged Bobcats but they know not what they do on the whole . . .
Cheers
al-J
You forgot to mention that "When the Deal Goes Down" borrows from the melody of Bing Crosby's "when the Blue of the Night meets the Gold of the Day"
if only he'd consulted you before going into the studio.
from chris gregory
It's all very well you getting pissed off with people who think Dylan is a genius but actually he IS a genius, whose work is so many hundreds of light years ahead of EVERYBODY in his field that even his minor works are well worth studying in detail. I found your your 'review' to be smug, condescending and simplistic. I just don't think you're
prepared to make the effort to listen to the words properly. For instance, the line about the rose poking through is actually a very poignant and significantpiece of symbolism when seen IN THE CONTEXT of the song.
You could easily demolish any song from 'Highway 61' in the same way if you wanted to: eg 'These people that you mentioned/Well I know them, they're quite lame'...Did Dylan REALLY write that? Taking some line out of context and ridiculing it is easy. You could equally do it to Shakespeare or Joyce or Keats or anybody else.
For the record, am posting Track By Track responses to MT at
http://www.chrisgregory.org/blog/CategoryView,category,Bob%2BDylan's%2BModern%2BTimes%2BTrack%2BBy%2BTrack.aspx
Try harder next time!
Chris, Good work. You really proved the essayist's theory about the rabid, defensive attitude of many Dylan fans. BTW Maybe you could explain the symbolism of the rose? Please do?
From Craig in Prestwick....
Chris, I've just floundered through two sections of your track by track saga.... You gotta lotta nerve to call this guy's work smug, condescending and simplistic. And you're pompous too. "Try harder next time!" Such insults only demean whatever you have to say. I think this essay is brilliantly written and very successful in that it proposes and justifies an opinion that, as your rant proves, is not welcome among large sections of the Dylan community.
the article is interesting to read for the most part, but i don't agree with many of its opinions, especially when the author says this album wouldn't stand 4 or 5 listenings if it wasn't by Bob Dylan. Ever since I first heard it I've wondered just the opposite -- what would critics have said about Modern Times if it had been a band's first album? I'm sure it would have been even more acclaimed than it already has.
well... i can perfectly heard it for a thousand years more.
"I'm as pale as a ghost
Holding a blossom on a stem
You ever seen a ghost? No
But you have heard of them".
Interesting reading, but I think the TWIBs you mention are without clothes (they are hollow men of straw) and maybe some Dylan afficionados like yourself are consistently overrating some of your dylan-lyrics-etc.-experiences from your days of youth - and don't you ever get tired of listening to Blood on the tracks all the time? The person you mention with a roomful of boots and never even listened once to BOTT is clearly a fiction on your part - but minus the fiction (of course he has listened to it a lot), this person has a point; which is not to say that everybody has to get it or that there is anything wrong in having delightful memories of the times when bob and me were young and everything was allright. Twibby
Strange as it might seem, he is not a fiction on my part. He is actually very much alive and well.
I'm afraid I haven't read every word of every post, so forgive me if this thought has already been expressed.
I think Modern Times is love song from the 65-year old Dylan to his younger self -- the one for which he had to develop a persona that fit the fans' image of him. The need to retain that persona is gone now, and he is both sad and happy about it.
Listen to the whole CD with that in mind and "you will sort of understand" ...
I guess I'm five years late to the party, but that does allow me the benefit of some perspective.
I think you greatly underrate Nettie Moore's musical richness. That and Spirit on the Water have stood the test of time for me anyway.
I think you are more generous about the quality of the vocals than I would be. I love the man as an artist, but the gravelly wreck that issues from his throat in the last 15-20 years simply isn't as effective as his younger and much-maligned whine.
(And IMO, the difference between bad Dylan and good Dylan is actually the chord progressions. Bad Dylan writes listless blues shuffles of no real musical interest. Thankfully, Nettie Moore isn't that...)
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