What Good Came From the Sixties?
LONG, MICHAEL
What Good Came from the Sixties? The answer, my friend, is Bob Dylan. BY MICHAEL LONG Pop music has given us talented stylists and praiseworthy songwriters—but only one artist. No one matters but...
...Its first cut, "Subterranean Homesick Blues," is still a powerful jolt of rock 'n' roll, playful and angry and artful all at once...
...Before the album's coda, the playful "Buckets of Rain," Dylan closes the record with "Shelter from the Storm," and somehow manages in a few short lines to simultaneously invoke hope and praise for—and distrust of—a lost lover: I'm livin' in a foreign country, but I'm bound to cross the line...
...His discomfort with authority—his own as well as that of others—was expressed early and often, notably in "Restless Farewell" (from his third album, The Times They Are A-Changin'), when he dismissed interest in being the leader of anybody's revolution: It's for myself and my friends my stories are sung...
...Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves...
...A lot of New York folkies were showing up there, too—it was a kind act from members of a small and tight-knit community, if not also a way to enjoy a little personal contact with their unofficial leader...
...Bootlegs abound of recordings cut from the album...
...He emerged in the early 1960s with a voice as authentic as the genres he seemed to have created...
...But, as Martha Bayles observes in her 1994 book Hole in our Soul, lyrics are not generally created to be examined apart from the music...
...Predictably, the so-called "serious" rock press was livid and sneering, with Rolling Stone (the journal that took its very name from his words) dismissing his new music as "Jesus-gonna-getcha" tunes...
...The album remains among the singer's most popular recordings, though Dylan himself said in response, "A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album...
...Among the songs that Dylan passed on was "Foot of Pride," a raging, stream-of-consciousness ramble that switches among times, perspectives, and even narrators...
...But Dylan sought neither credit nor blame for any of that—and still hasn't even today...
...The song also demonstrates the intellectual short-sightedness of considering Dylan's lyrics—considering any songwriter's lyrics—as pure poetry...
...For any other artist, this time would have been praised as a creative renaissance...
...The record initially sold a disappointing five thousand copies...
...The result was a whole new level of critical and popular acclaim—and a new kind of American art...
...But the record is quite good, a mix of broken-heart songs and meditations at the end of life, all of it capped by only the second long-form Dylan song since the 1960s (the first being "Brownsville Girl" written with Sam Shepard for the 1986 album Knocked Out Loaded...
...For a time, Dylan even renounced his catalog and began playing concerts in which he performed only religious songs...
...No one mined the new possibilities of electric, intelligent music more artfully than Dylan himself—and no one did it (for a while, at least) with more commercial success...
...His most recent recording of original material, Time Out of Mind in 1997, met with a critical reception that lapsed into sycophancy, so fashionable is it now among critics to admire Bob Dylan...
...Bob Dylan's work is art because it does what art should do: edify and entertain, provoke thought, promote truth, extol beauty...
...It's hard for me to relate to that—I mean, people enjoying that type of pain...
...Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group, a strategy and public relations firm in Washington, D.C...
...By 1965, Bob Dylan was a household name and the poet laureate of the youth movement...
...Blood on the Tracks is a collection of tales of lost love, missed opportunity, regret, and rage...
...It don't matter, anyhow...
...Dylan, described as being a veritable "Woody Guthrie jukebox" at the time, had no following, no record deal, and no articulated artistic vision...
...But don't think twice, it's all right...
...And then, already notorious for going his own way, Dylan committed what to many seemed to be professional—and creative—suicide: He became a born-again Christian, had the nerve to actually tell people about it, and began to write music about Jesus...
...We're idiots, babe...
...When your rooster crows at the break of dawn, look out your window and I'll be gone...
...He did nothing less than upend the cultural landscape...
...I can't even touch the books you've read...
...Starting off with the classic "Tangled Up in Blue," a many-layered epic about a man and a woman who cannot connect for long, Dylan relates all the emotions that come at the bitter end of a relationship...
...The song does not easily lend itself to any particular interpretation...
...In 1960, nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York from Hib-bing, Minnesota, with the singular goal of comforting Woody Guthrie, who was dying in Brooklyn State Hospital...
...But it ain't me, babe...
...He quickly became a leading light...
...Dylan, however, plowed on, ultimately recording four Christ-themed albums...
...Someone to open each and every door...
...Yet in this period of depressed record sales and critical spitballs, Dylan produced some of the greatest songwriting and recording of his career...
...Yet Oh Mercy is so well executed and so listenable that it is easy to miss the simple point of the album: The world is falling apart...
...Dylan's run-on lyrics—Maggie comes fleet foot, / face full of black soot, / talkin' that the heat put / plants in the bed but—are less meaningful for what they are about than they are for the sheer musicality of their sound...
...Dylan joined the city's folk music scene, picking up standards from other performers around Greenwich Village and from recordings (most often those of folk icon Ramblin' Jack Elliott...
...Infidels is less a whole album than part of one...
...But what do you care...
...Dylan's grand experiment loosed something unpleasant, too: the possibility of legitimacy for every line of navel-gazing twaddle that would ever be set to music...
...With that, Dylan turned his back on folk and, significantly, on the folk movement...
...But Dylan's talent was clear...
...Oh the shepherd is asleep Where the willows weep And the mountains are filled With lost sheep...
...Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats, blowing through the letters that we wrote...
...Recorded in a single afternoon on a $400 budget, Bob Dylan was a collection of folk and blues standards supplemented by two original compositions...
...Live recordings of the early days document just what he could do: His heart-bruising rendition of the slave lament "No More Auction Block"—available only as a bootleg recording until its official release, thirty years later—reveals a young man with the world-weary delivery of someone three times his years...
...But as the decade closed and Bob Dylan approached the age of fifty, he found yet another second wind...
...The key to Dylan's fast success was his voice...
...Young people once again came to his concerts, his deep and remarkable catalog was rediscovered by radio and a new generation of music consumers, and he established a fresh reservoir of goodwill that would carry him through his more forgettable releases (such as 1990's Under the Red Sky, featuring the ridiculous "Wiggle Wiggle") and difficult, dull collections of Smithsonian-housed folk standards (World Gone Wrong and Good as I Been To You...
...Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin' I was somebody else instead...
...But Dylan never seemed as uncomfortable as when he was held up as a leader—it was a characteristic that would present itself throughout his career (don't follow leaders, he would pen that same year in "Subterranean Homesick Blues...
...Now Dylan's antique voice was applied to his own words and music, and the combination was breathtaking...
...The message is there for the hearing, the words rising out of Lanois's sonic jungle in song after song...
...He also added an ordained minister to his road crew and began preaching sermons—interesting, Dylanesque sermons, but sermons nonetheless—at his shows...
...1 need a dump truck, mama, to unload my head...
...Dylan's aching, soaring vocal conveys real pain over the "many thousands gone," a profound and mortal injury that prohibits the narrator, a just-emancipated slave, from fully accepting his freedom...
...Comic parodies of his voice have become standard over the last twenty years, but Bob Dylan was initially recognized for his singing talent...
...The embrace of Oh Mercy by both critics and the public sparked a modest Dylan renaissance that continues today...
...Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm...
...You think He's just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires...
...Now forever established in the pop firmament—the song "Like a Rolling Stone" is perennially listed as one of the finest rock songs ever recorded—Bob Dylan entered a relatively fallow period that would last a decade...
...If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born...
...In 1975, Dylan's best strokes emerged again with Blood on the Tracks, a song cycle apparently inspired by Dylan's breakup with his first wife, Sara Lowndes...
...For the balance of the 1980s, Dylan released five albums and a compilation boxed set, and was once again largely ignored by the public, just as he had been in the late 1970s...
...After four acoustic albums, Dylan was officially an Icon, and his lyrics served as elegant shorthand among the counterculture...
...Dylan embraced country music, recorded with Johnny Cash, collaborated with Robbie Robertson and the Band, and wrote the classic "All Along the Watchtower...
...He allowed his public personality to be drawn only on the basis of his creative output...
...But that changed fast...
...While folk music had its fans, it had yet to achieve a significant segment of the market for recorded music...
...Released only five months after Back Home, Dylan's next album, Highway 61 Revisited, further explored beat territory: The record is populated by biblical characters, circus performers, historical figures, and clueless moderns, and the imagery in the lyrics (of both records) is by turns nonsensical, bizarre, touching, and troubling—though when it worked, it really worked: Well, you know I need a steam shovel, mama, to keep away the dead...
...That song, "Highlands," seems a monologue about weariness at the end of life, about longing for heaven, being misunderstood, missing one's youth, and perhaps even running out of songs: The party's over, and there's less and less to say / I got new eyes / Everything looks far away...
...By 1979, he had receded to become more of a totem than an active force in popular music...
...This amazing album also includes Dylan's prescient "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," while still making room for a few non-political things—especial-ly the sad, playful "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right": It ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe, if you don't know by now...
...And there is plenty of pain...
...In 1963 came Dylan's second chance, the album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and a mature artist sprang forth fully formed...
...And of course Dylan remained the artist who speaks in riddles...
...His records grew progressively weaker, his performances were more often incoherent, and he scraped bottom with 1988's shambles of a live record, Dylan & the Dead...
...He continued his so-called "Never-Ending Tour" around the world, and the crowds dwindled...
...Over nothing but a pair of minor chords relentlessly repeated, Dylan uses simple couplets to curse the masters of war, far from the frontlines, who build the "big bombs" and the "death planes," who treat the men of his generation like cannon fodder...
...Fans abandoned him in droves...
...Producer Daniel Lanois introduced an aurally dense sound that directly contrasted with the melody- and riff-oriented production of Knopfler and Wexler, and the straightforward styles of his first producers, Bob Johnston and Tom Wilson...
...It is a kaleidoscope of images and emotions on anti-spiritualism, vanity, and immorality: They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young..../ In these times of compassion when conformity's in fashion / Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in...
...No one matters but Bob Dylan...
...After the disappointing sales of the stellar Infidels, Dylan slid into yet another creative trough...
...Also left behind was "Blind Willie McTell," one of Dylan's greatest long-unreleased compositions, in which the singer laments the lack of one who can adequately express sorrow over the torpor of the age...
...He issued another dismissal at the close of his next album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, in a now-famous love song, heavy with double meanings: You say you're lookin'for someone never weak, but always strong, to protect you an' defend you whether you are right or wrong...
...Dylan's literary ambiguity combined with the political proclivities of his fans paved the way for decades of self-righteousness from such bands as the Clash, the Dead Kennedys, and Rage Against the Machine...
...In "Jokerman," he seems to recognize mankind as at once flawed and gifted, and he contrasts man's great abilities with his moral ambivalence: You're a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds.../ You're going to Sodom and Gomorrah...
...Dylan's creative revival was shortlived...
...The very first song, "Blowin' in the Wind," borrows the melodic essence of "Auction Block" and transforms it from field blues into an acoustic anthem...
...He just kept making music...
...The recording did little for either Columbia or Dylan...
...it is the apparently capricious remainder of numerous, rich sessions produced by guitar master Mark Knopfler...
...Within two years of his arrival, he had a record deal...
...Dylan's raw interpretations make the cardigan harmonies of Peter, Paul, and Mary sound like dorm-room anthems for the privileged...
...They are a pleasure to hear, a pleasure to sing...
...An' it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe...
...It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves...
...He redefined the method and meaning of music itself...
...But he could also match his indignation with gentleness: In the fury of the moment, I can see the Master's hand, / in every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand...
...You're the reason I'm travelin' on...
...Yet unlike the posturing punk rockers of the early 1980s—whose "message" was mere adolescent attitude— Dylan does not revel in destruction and loss, but mourns it: Ring them bells Sweet Martha, For the poor man's son, Ring them bells so the world will know That God is one...
...Dylan's final "Christian" album, Infidels, was a high-water mark for his creativity in those years...
...Follow-ups to Blood on the Tracks were disappointing, and the wholesale shift of the record business to dance music left no room on the radio for the difficult voice (in every sense) of Bob Dylan...
...He was also a twenty-four-year-old, bridling under a mammoth reputation and restless for change...
...The song is one of the best examples of the integration of music and lyrics in Dylan's songs to create a mood...
...so great are these missing songs that Columbia eventually released many of them as part of an "official bootleg" boxed set in 1991...
...Dylan's abilities as a songwriter remained strong, though his beat-influenced experiments caused his work to suffer as often as it succeeded...
...That's true enough (though the well-known literary critic Christopher Ricks has recently launched a defense of Dylan as a poet...
...The critic Morris Dickstein once noted that Dylan has "produced nothing which could be anthologized in any first-class collection of verse...
...charts, and remained in the Top 100 for nine months...
...Instead of the bright guitar strums of "Mr...
...And, echoing Macbeth's "Tomorrow" soliloquy in "Idiot Wind," his usual attacks on the hypocrisy of the world are traded in for soul-shredding examinations of self: I can't feel you anymore...
...These arrangements with their thick, electronic sound were as integral to meaning and mood as Dylan's lyrics and melodies had once been...
...Two cuts later comes "Masters of War," perhaps the most powerful antiwar song ever set down...
...Yet it is widely believed that the record could have been even better, and it serves as an excellent demonstration of why Dylan's fans are so often frustrated by his output...
...Bringing It All Back Home was Bob Dylan's most successful album to date: It peaked at six on the U.S...
...But given the impact of the first six years of his career, almost nothing that followed could have measured up...
...The 1989 album Oh Mercy wiped out the memory of Dylan's weak 1980s output...
...He had, in his growling interpretations, a voice beyond his years and, in the new compositions, a hint of humor...
...In the most fundamental shift of his career, he simultaneously embraced electric rock 'n' roll and began experimenting with beat-style lyrics...
...In the title track, Dylan warns the smiling corrupters of mankind that they will someday answer to a higher power whose arrival is inexorable...
...Oh Mercy also marked another shift: If Dylan's outlook on the future had been dark before, it now seemed positively black...
...His first album was recorded in 1962 by Columbia Records' John Hammond, who was led to Dylan by the New York Times folk-music critic Bob Shelton...
...Tambourine Man," Lanois produced Dylan in a mysterious fog of riffs, sound effects, and rhythm...
...According to his high school annual, Robert Zimmerman aspired "to join Little Richard," yet he began his career singing—under the assumed name "Bob Dylan"—old folk and blues standards...
...The first Christian album, Slow Train Coming, was co-produced by soul-music giant Jerry Wexler...
...If we believe character cannot be divorced from the nature of what is produced—that the heart of a man appears in his creations—then the music of Bob Dylan tells us that he is a man of integrity and character, a worker for beauty and truth and good...
...The influence of his first "electric" album, 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, can hardly be overstated: It gave birth to nothing less than the possibility of electric music as literature...
...It is their combination with melody that brings them to life...
...Dylan, no stranger to fire and brimstone as an anti-war folkie, had plenty to say too about the power of the righteous and angry God he now followed: Do you ever wonder just what God requires...
...Moreover, what we know of Dylan comes almost exclusively from his art...
...Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make it mine...
Vol. 6 • January 2001 • No. 16
