STUFF YOU GOTTA WATCH - Bob Dylan's 115th Comeback

Bobbin' Along in Modern Times

Latest Album in Bob Dylan's 115th Comeback
By John V. Brennan
September, 2006

Bob Dylan once wrote a line that for a long time I thought would be his epitaph: "You would not think to look at him, but he was famous long ago". Well, guess what, I was wrong. Bob Dylan's MODERN TIMES reached number one on the music charts, his first number one showing in decades. He even outsold Jessica Simpson. There just may be hope for this world after all.

The Man in White I should get this out right away: Modern Times is not a bad album. I like it. I am listening to it right now ("In this earthly domain/ full of disappointment and pain/ you'll never see me frown"). But the pre-release chatter pegged this album as one of Dylan's greatest ever efforts, and I just don't hear it that way. It's a warm, easygoing album, it has several lovely tunes, and some excellent Dylanesque turns of phrase ("I can't go to Paradise no more/ I killed a man back there"). But I can't help but think that somewhere, in Bob's trunk of unrecorded songs, he must have written some things in the past five years that could have replaced some of those dull rewrites of old blues tunes that mark this album as a lesser effort that its two illustrious predecessors Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft.

Nevertheless, I am listening to it and liking it more each time. How can you not like an album by a guy that rhymes "sons of bitches" with "orphanages" or begins a verse with "I'm the only son of a crazy man / I'm in a cowboy band" ? So, yes, I still skip over those old blues tunes now and again, but I'll always listen to the rockabilly-bob "Thunder on the Mountain", in which Bob (I think it's Bob) gets three guitar solos. I say I think it's Bob because he has a superb band right now, but the guitar solos on this song seem a little ragged. In a good way, that is. It's not much of a song, but it's a good album opener.

"Spirit on the Water", which follows, is a beautiful title but turns out to be just another 1930's tap-dancing tune akin to several on Love and Theft. Trouble is, it's not as nearly as fun or creative as some of those songs. On Love and Theft, Bob not only cracked corny jokes in his lyrics but also repeatedly forced thirty syllables into musical phrases that could only comfortably fit ten or twelve. Just compare this from "Spirit on the Water":

"Life without you
   doesn't mean a thing to me
   if I can't have you
   I'll throw my love into the deep blue sea"

to this from Love and Theft's "Poor Boy":

   "Othello told Desdemona
      'I'm cold, cover me with a blanket/
by the way, what happened to the that poison wine?',
      she says 'I gave it to you and ya drank it'"

"Poor Boy" and other songs on Love and Theft are full of such good stuff in which Dylan races with himself to see if his lyrics or his melodies will get to the finish line first. "Spirit on the Water, however, despite a catchy melody and thirties-style chord changes, just goes on and on and on, with very few memorable thoughts beyond the kind of moon - June couplets of Nashville Skyline. It's only in the last few verses that his lyrics start to get interesting, and then, as soon as he has your attention, he brings the song to a conclusion right in the middle of the album's only harmonica solo. The song is perfectly okay if you play it as background music, which it tends to become after three or four verses.

Much more successful, and for me the best song on the album, is "When the Deal Goes Down" (1), a simply gorgeous waltz that sounds like Dylan's attempt to match his own take on Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" on the all-acoustic Good as I Been to You. It seems that Bob is still trying to write The Great American Song, and still has a hankering to be Bing Crosby. (2) It ain't never gonna happen, Bob, but it's fun to hear you attempting to croon with what little voice you have left.

Okay, the voice, always a bone of contention for music-lovers who just cannot listen to Bob Dylan. This time around, it is warmer and less ragged than the one he used for Love and Theft, but not as powerful. So the rockers and blues tunes don't have the kick of Love and Theft's "Summer Days" or "Lonesome Day Blues", because, after two decades of non-stop touring, Bob just can't pump up the volume any more. But the ballads and country tunes sound just fine. That includes "Workingman's Blues #2", a nod to Merle Haggard and not a blues despite the title, and "Beyond the Horizon", a melodic country-swing tune that would have been perfect for the Sons of the Pioneers or Bob Willis.

I also like "Nettie Moore", which has a slow tune that seems a little off at first, but grabs me more with each new listen, with a chorus is just heartbreaking and lovely ("I loved ya then/ and ever shall/ but there's no one left to tell"). I'm not sure what I think of the album's final song, "Ain't Talkin'". It wants to be an album closer, seems written to be an album closer, and maybe that's the problem. It tries too hard to be deep and meaningful. He's Bob Dylan; he shouldn't have to try so hard.

The theme of the album is that the world's gone wrong but love still makes it go round. Then again, hasn't this been the theme of every album since Dylan first appeared on the scene in the early '60s? The musicianship is superb, and that includes Bob's one - note - fits - all guitar solos. The entire album sounds like it was recorded live, with each song being done in only a handful of takes. Which means that you have to live with the words at the end of lines that just trail off into indecipherability, the bad grammar that should have been caught ("More frailer", Bob?) and, the hallmark sound of Dylan's music for the past two decades, phlegm. Once in a while, you'll wish Bob just cleared his throat and said "Let's try that again, fellas."

I've almost made it through the whole review without mentioning Alicia Keys, which seems to be that starting point for every other review I've read. Yes, Bob mentions Alicia Keys, right in the second verse of "Thunder on the Mountain". Seems he has a little crush. Good for him. But I don't see why, after name-checking Shakespeare, T.S Eliot, Clark Gable and even himself ("You can call me Bobby/ or you can call me Zimmy") over the years, the mere mention of Alicia Keys is such a shock.

The real shock is that Bob reached number one again. I don't mean that Modern Times isn't worthy of being number one. I don't think it's a masterpiece, but it's a fine, rewarding album that's probably more honest and alive than anything else on the charts right now, so number one is just fine with me. It's shocking because this is 2006 and we're talking about Bob Dylan. He's old, he's cranky, his voice is shot, he's weird and he has bad hair and a cheesy mustache. He gets his kicks these days writing and singing thirties-style tunes, country swing and blues. He was supposed to be washed up years ago. And yet he we are, in an entertainment environment filled with thugs posing as street poets, anorexic blond party animals posing as singers, and American Idol winners posing as important recording artists, and Bob Dylan beat them all, at least for a moment. But it's a moment that hints that that maybe this "earthly domain filled with disappointment and pain" isn't as bad off as Dylan himself makes it out to be. ½ - JB

NOTES: (1) Believe it or not, Scarlett Johansson appears in Bob's video for this song. My sweet Lord, is this girl in everything these days?

(2) I attributed Dylan's writing "When the Deal Goes Down" to his sometimes-mentioned admiration of Bing Crosby. Little did I realize that the "simply gorgeous waltz" was actually a Dylan' rewrite of "When the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)", Bing Crosby's signature song, written by Crosby, Roy Turk and Fred E. Albert, and released in 1932. The melodic differences between Crosby's song and Dylan's are negligible, right down to the opening bars, where Crosby's horns are turned into slide guitars on Dylan's version. The lifting of the melody wouldn't bother me that much, if I hadn't also learned that he pinched the melody of "Beyond the Horizon" from "Red Sails in the Sunset", also recorded by Crosby, and the melody of Love and Theft's' "Floater" from "Snuggled in My Shoulder", written by Joe Young and Carmen Lombardo and recorded by Crosby as well as Al Bowlly. Even the distinctively strange violin interlude come from "Snuggled on My Shoulder" and not from Dylan's imagination.

Which still wouldn't bother me all that much, except that I've now learned that some of Dylan's lyrics on both Love and Theft and Modern Times were lifted from other authors. I'm not talking about Dylan's habit of taking a random line from a book or a movie and spinning it into his own work, but rather lifting phrases and sentences from the same books or authors again and again. It's one thing to throw a line from The Great Gatsby, The Maltese Falcon or even Star Trek into a song, as Dylan has done on many an occasion. But it's quite another to keep taking one author's words again and again, twist them a bit (or not) and pass them off as your own. Highly disingenuous, as well as disappointing when it is done by the man whom many called America's Greatest Songwriter. And all this has taken away much of the pleasure when I listen to Modern Times. Granted, there's still a lot of original Dylan lyrics left, I presume. But that is the problem - once it is shown that you have plagiarized from somebody, all your other work, even if original, comes under suspicion.