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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
He showed up on the New York folk scene in the late 1950s; the chubby youngster on his first record jacket soon became lithe and wiry. Similarly, he began as a conventional folkie and immediately became unconventional, transcending the genre. His second album, "Freewheelin'," contains among other songs "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Of these, "Don't Think Twice" is the slightest, but as late as 1999, reworked and expanded, it became a coursing, rueful, unforgettable anchor of his live shows. His third record, "The Times They Are A-Changin'," has the undeniable title song; a frightening rural Gothic, "Ballad of Hollis Brown"; possibly the most focused and precise and persuasive of his protest songs, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll"; and, finally, "Boots of Spanish Leather," an abstract classic and one of the purest, most confounding folk songs of the time.
A lesser, "relationship" album, "Another Side of Bob Dylan," contains "Chimes of Freedom," Dylan's lovely hymn to "the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse." After this, he grew into his talents; between March 1965 and May 1966 he released eight album sides -- "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited" and the two-record "Blonde on Blonde," not to mention "Positively 4th Street," the meanest top 10 single in the history of rock. He outwrote, outsang and outperformed everyone.
"Bringing It All Back Home" begins with his first electric track on an album, "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It also includes "Maggie's Farm," a loping, laconic look at the service industry; "Mr. Tambourine Man," rock's most feeling paean to psychedelia, all the more compelling in that it's done acoustically; "Love Minus Zero/No Limit," the uncharacteristically straightforward love song that begins, "My love she speaks like silence/Without ideals or violence"; and "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," which someone once said is to capitalism what "Darkness at Noon" is to communism. (The song also contains a fair collection of Dylan's most famous lines: "He not busy being born is busy dying"; "It's easy to see without looking too far/That not much is really sacred"; "Even the president of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked"; "Money doesn't talk, it swears"; "If my thought-dreams could be seen/They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.")
After he released that album in 1965, he went on a short tour of Europe, chronicled in the documentary "Dont [sic] Look Back." He returned to find a pop audience polarized over "Subterranean Homesick Blues"; he played with a full electric band at the Newport Folk Festival and in Forest Hills, Queens, and was booed for his trouble.
Amid this jet stream of work, he married Sara Lownds (or Lownes or Lowndes) in late 1965. They had four children over the next four or five years: Jesse, Anna, Samuel and Jacob, later Jakob, now successful with his band the Wallflowers. (For 30 years, amusingly enough, Dylan's biographers have been giving the children various ages and names, as well as spelling Sara Dylan's name from her previous marriage in various ways; most of the biographies don't mention her real name, which was apparently Shirley Nowinsky.)
"Highway 61 Revisited" starts off with "Like a Rolling Stone," a pretty good song. Dylan once accepted a civil rights award at a swanky dinner and coldly told the well-dressed crowd, "My [black] friends don't wear suits." In "Like a Rolling Stone" he bites an even bigger hand that feeds him, portraying an entire youth generation as a slumming sorority girl -- and that's just the first verse. Then he gets nasty: The rest of the song is the rock 'n' roll equivalent of one of those scenes in "The Sopranos" in which a mobster systematically kicks the bejesus out of someone who's already down. Is "Like a Rolling Stone" the most powerful, difficult, unexpected and unrelenting performance in rock? Got another candidate?
The song "Highway 61 Revisited" may be Dylan's most disturbing composition, a tone poem of brutal capitalism, incest, biblical farce, warmongering and family entertainment, all set to a carnival beat that to this day gets his yuppie fans up to boogie at his live performances.
On "Blonde on Blonde," his singing alone is a catalog of the human emotion genome, excepting perhaps mercy. One of the great joys of the CD age is listening to that epic tale uninterrupted from start to finish. Dylan swaggers, brags, sighs, loves, loses, smiles, grieves, pleads, lusts, swoons and trips -- and that's just on "Pledging My Time" and "Visions of Johanna." The album contains "Just Like a Woman," a love song so elegant and confused it's not clear today, nearly 35 years later, whether it is insufferably condescending or startlingly loving. Another picaresque, "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again," has his most canny female character -- Ruthie, who tells him that his debutante just knows what he needs, but she knows what he wants. The album ends with a song that took up an entire album side back in the vinyl days, a love song to Sara Dylan, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," more feverish and disturbed than even Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks."
Dylan was in a motorcycle accident in 1966; it has never been clear how badly he was hurt. The next few years he spent playing with the Band in Woodstock, in upstate New York, and releasing calmer, subtler albums -- "John Wesley Harding," "Nashville Skyline," the benighted "Self Portrait" and then finally, "New Morning," a blithely titled and performed redux.
In the mid-'70s he really came back. Alone among his '60s counterparts he accomplished an extended burst of creativity equal to his first. From 1974 to 1977, Dylan released "Planet Waves," a spare but twisted collection of songs recorded with the Band; "Before the Flood," a ferocious, loud and harsh double live album with the Band from the acclaimed 1974 tour; "The Basement Tapes," a five-year-old, much-bootlegged collection of Americana recordings from his Woodstock Gethsemane; "Blood on the Tracks," an epic and disturbing romantic song cycle; and "Desire," a shambling, often ferocious rock album.
He then organized and carried out the Rolling Thunder Tour, an aggregation that included Joan Baez, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Ronee Blakely, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, T-Bone Burnett and many other old friends and musicians. He later directed a four-hour feature film based around the tour, called "Renaldo and Clara." This period wound down with an amazing and peculiar hourlong TV concert memorialized on the live album "Hard Rain"; "Street Legal," an often-derided collection of post-Rolling Thunder songs; and "At Budokan," a two-record live set immortalizing Dylan's failed attempt to go Vegas on a worldwide scale.
