STUFF YOU GOTTA WATCH - Bob Dylan and When Music Mattered

Down the Foggy Ruins of Time

Bob Dylan and When Music Mattered

By John V. Brennan
September, 2005

Hillary Duff has the top-selling album for the second week in a row, 50 Cent has written an autobiography, and CBGB's is closing down because rock is dead. All of this makes me thank the Lord and Sony Records, in that order, for the wealth of Bob Dylan material they have released in the last two years.

Now, certainly Dylan is past his heyday, and little he does now will affect pop music in one way or the other. But that doesn't matter to me any more, because I have long given up the ghost of the idea that somebody someday will save popular music. I have been a Dylan fan for 27 years and the past decade or so has been a good one, Bobwise. Not an album every year like he (and everybody else) use used to record, but one every few years, and usually worth the wait. Two back to roots folk albums in the 1990s, featuring just Bob, his guitar and his harmonica, followed by the swampy Time Out of Mind and a few years later, the kick-ass Love and Theft. Add to that several new volumes in Sony's ongoing Bootleg series, and it was the best time to be a Dylan fan since 1964-66.

That's what it's always about when many people talk about Bob. If they aren't talking about those mid-sixties years, when Bob released three classic albums in a row (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde), they're talking about Blood on the Tracks from the 1970s. Everything else Bob has done since is always seen through these dual prisms. "His best since Blood on the Tracks"... "It rocks like Highway 61 Revisited"...

Me, I enjoy Bob for whatever he was at the moment he was recording the album. Yes, Blood on the Tracks and those three electric albums from 1965-66 were highwater marks for Dylan, but I let Bob albums just be themselves. I can listen to a somewhat lighter album like 1971's New Morning (Dylan's piano playing holds it all together) and not worry about whether it is as good as Blonde on Blonde. To me, growling, howling wolf Bob of Love and Theft is just another side of the shouting, electric Bob of the Sixties, or broken-hearted Bob of Blood on the Tracks. They are all different Bobs and all the same. Knockin' at death's door Bob of Time Out of Mind, syrupy country crooner Bob of Nashville Skyline, fire and brimstone Bob of Slow Train Coming. All different, all the same. I try never to expect or guess what Bob will do next. A commercial for Victoria's Secret? What, that wasn't a MAD-TV sketch? Oh, well. I guess Bob had his reasons and that's fine with me.

So Sony has just released a special live CD from New York City's Gaslight Club, 1962. It's available only at your local Starbuck's. Has Bob sold out? Oh, well, I guess Bob had his reasons, and, hey, the tall Caramel Frappuccino was quite tasty, thank you. The best moment of the disc is the opening cut, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", which he sings and plays almost exactly like the recorded version from his groundbreaking folk album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. During the choruses of "and it's a hard, it's a hard...", I heard what sounded like some sort of room ambience, or perhaps distortion caused by the sound level. But by the third or fourth chorus, I realized that it's really just a sparse crowd singing along, more of them joining in each time. Pretty cool. Also cool is Bob trying out his new song, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", without the finger-picking or half the words. Imagine that. There was a time when performers could actually go on stage and just try something off the cuff to see if it works. Try that on American Idol. A young Bob Dylan would have been voted off that show on day one. Most of the other tracks on this CD feature Dylan doing the kind of nice, traditional folk material that he would quickly transcend with his own self-penned tunes, though "Cocaine" is a fun one, even without my favorite lyrical ad-lib (from another Dylan performance of this song): "Hey, there, baby, all dressed in purple/ Come over here, wanna see yer nipple."

Live 1964 was released last year, but I only added it to my collection this week. It is a complete Dylan concert from New York's Philharmonic Hall, Halloween night. In those early years, Columbia Records was always recording Dylan concerts for potential release, though they never did get around to releasing one in the Sixties. Fans have always been grateful that this particular night was recorded, and most self-respecting Bobcats have at least one of the many great-sounding bootleg releases of this in their collection. At the time, Bob had four albums under his belt and was writing songs for a fifth, so he already had a good backlog of songs from which to pick his set. Many favorites are here, like "The Times, They Are A- Changin", "Hard Rain" and "It Ain't Me Babe". He tries out new ones, soon to be recorded for the half-acoustic, half-rock and roll Bringing It All Back Home. What must fans have thought of such complex, unfathomable lyrical concoctions like "It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" or "Gates of Eden"?

Bob and his audience had fun that Halloween night. He strums the opening of "I Don't Believe You" for about a minute before realizing he cannot remember the words. "Does anybody know the first words to this song?", he cries out, and many respond, allowing him to launch into it without missing a beat. Late in the concert, he brings out folk music Joan Baez, whose voice was as beautiful as Bob's was ugly. Yet somehow, because of their mutual affection for each other, they make it work. On "Mama, You've Been on My Mind", Bob forgets his own words again, and Joan bails him out. By the time he gets to "All I Really Want to Do", he has so much positive energy built up from the night, his rendition explodes with joy, rendering his officially recorded version of the song obsolete.

Perhaps the best moment of the night is the funny and revealing comment from Dylan: "It's Halloween... I've got my 'Bob Dylan' mask on."

Bob No Direction Home, the latest Dylan compilation, is the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese's upcoming four-hour documentary of the same name. 28 tracks, 26 of them previously unreleased, covering 1961 to 1966. Much of it is more historically interesting than musically, but there are a few revelations here. Finally released is the first version of "Mr. Tambourine Man", originally recorded in 1964 for Another Side of Bob Dylan and featuring Rambling Jack Elliot singing harmony on the chorus. It was left off the album, Bob's decision, and a good decision it was. Although the melody, which is one of Dylan's finest, is completely recognizable, the Another Side rendition features the same draggy chung - chung - chung guitar playing that mars much of that album, sapping the energy out of some of Dylan's best compositions. Bob recorded that album in a single night (while drinking heavily), and after the results, I suspect he made a promise to himself that in the future, he would take at least three days to record an album. Bob would resurrect "Mr. Tambourine Man" on his next album, Bringing It All Back Home, and that version is arguably Dylan's best studio recording ever, with a great vocal, spot-on harmonica solos, and the upbeat rhythm of Dylan's guitar combining with Bruce Langhorne's tasteful electric guitar licks to perfectly capture the feeling of the "jingle jangle morning" found in the lyrics.

The electric stuff from 1965 and '66 is more intriguing, though some selections, like "Highway 61" without the signature slide-whistle, are mere curiousities. It's still a great, rocking tune, but the slide whistle found on the official take makes all the difference in the world. An alternate take of one of my favorite Dylan tunes, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", equals if not surpasses the official take, as does a slower early take of "She Belongs to Me" which gets to the heart of the song better than the more upbeat version released on Bringing It All Back Home. A haunting, electric late-night take of the epic "Desolation Row" makes it sound like a completely different song than the one that wraps up Highway 61 Revisited. Finally making it out of the Columbia/Sony vaults is the historical moment from the 1965 Newport Folk festival where Dylan "went electric", backed up by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The only selection included here is Bob's opener, "Maggie's Farm", with Bob shouting out the lyrics while guitarist Mike Bloomfield goes completely nuts, firing off insane blues licks throughout the song. If you've heard "Tombstone Blues" from Highway 61 Revisited, you can just imagine using that arrangement and applying it to "Maggie's Farm".

But the shocker of the collection is a studio version of "Visions of Johanna" done with the Hawks (later to be The Band) plus Al Kooper on additional organ. This song, one of Dylan's top ten greatest compositions, was tried many ways, and was always performed as a solo acoustic song on tour in 1966. The official take, found on Blonde on Blonde, is also done with a band, but it is tasteful and delicate, befitting the lyrics. The No Direction Home take is 180 degrees away from that version. With Bob singing as loud as he can to be heard over the musicians, Levon Helm on drums and Rick Danko on bass driving things along with a hypnotic, syncopated rhythm, and guitarist Robbie Robertson and keyboardists Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Al Kooper making a cacophany of rhythmic noise throughout, the electric "Visions of Johanna" sounds like a hundred robotic six-foot lemmings happily marching off a mile-high cliff to their doom. It is much what Dylan and the Hawks sounded like in concert, but it was all wrong for this song. It seems obvious that the officially released take is always going to be the best studio version, but this electric version is fascinating, showing that Dylan worked much like a jazz musician, with each take of a song being an entity unto itself, not just a rehearsal but a new performance. The Beatles would have never attempted "Michelle" with a "Tomorrow Never Knows" arrangement, but Bob often needed to explore every angle with his songs before being satisfied, and even then, he would continue throughout his life and concerts to apply new textures, rhythms and melodies to them. Unlike some bands and musicians who are satisfied to recreate every recorded lick with supreme faithfulness in concert, Dylan might go out and try "Watching the River Flow" pumped up like Elvis's "Mystery Train", or "Don't Think Twice" redone as reggae, just to see if it works.

Scorsese's film comes out toward the end of this month. I am not going to deceive myself into thinking that it is going to bring about a resurgence of interest in Bob Dylan. Not that nobody is interested in Dylan these days. I am, and, if Starbuck's is right, so are many other people. In 40-plus years, only one official release of his has gone out of print in the States (a half-hearted collection of outtakes simply called DYLAN). So I know that Bob is still popular, just not Hillary Duff or 50 Cent popular, which is probably fine with him and it's certainly fine with me.

I know the film is going to be good (see, it's Martin Scorsese, it's Bob Dylan... you get the picture?). What I don't know is whether forty years from now, there will be any musician, pop star or lyricist from these days worth making a four-hour documentary about. (BRITNEY SPEARS: WHAT WERE WE THINKING?). But as long as Sony keeps releasing old Dylan stuff every year, I don't much care. - JB