Soon after Time Out of Mind rang back to life that cathedral bell in his wandering mind — his Genius Zone, or whatever you want to call it — Bod Dylan made some moves.
Whatever you want to call it: the Zone is what makes somebody extraordinary, a conjurer, knocking down just a peg peers like John Prine and Joni and Leonard Cohen and the Rain Dog and a raft of other troubadours and American chroniclers who wear that Legend hat. It’s whatever part of his mind rendered him capable of magicking art that defined a time — the folky early and mid-Sixties (and all of the Sixties, for that matter) — and a place, a scene (Greenwich Village). But thirty-some-odd years later, after the triumph of Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan’s Genius Zone was back, and he decided it was time to define not an era but a half a century.
It’s impossible to get to the bottom of how in the hell he went from Woody Guthrie-acolyte to electric late-Sixties Rock’n’Roller — shoulder-to-shoulder with them British bad boys the Rolling Stones — to a soft country music phase (while everyone else was getting psychedelic), to a spottier ‘70s (and the confessional masterwork Blood On the Tracks) and then to his Christian Zone, and then an occasionally brilliant yet artistically stunted Dinosaur Zone in the ‘80s and early ‘90s… and then to what he’s done now, somewhat unnoticed, in our modern times.
Somewhat unnoticed, because it’s doubtful the new generation of Dylan-lovers or at least the Dylan-curious beget by the recent Timothée Chalamet vehicle A Complete Unknown are queuing up Tempest and Rough and Rowdy Ways on Spotify. They’re queuing up The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Highway 61 Revisited. (That’s if listening to whole albums front-to-back is still even a thing.) In any case, that’s great. A mainstream cultural boon for our country’s last living mondo bard is, well, just a damn good thing for the culture.
If you’re not a professional music critic (and I am not) or kind of old (not yet!), you probably don’t know a whole hell of a lot of people who are even remotely aware that Bob Dylan’s studio output between 1997 and 2020 easily rivals his run in the Sixties. If we’re talking in years, it’s not even close.
But let’s be fair and weigh these epochs of glory in twenty year increments: the early Sixties through the Seventies; the turn of the new millennium through 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. If we’re talking about numbers of recognized “classic albums,” then, sure, the ‘60s and ‘70s Dylan whips the dogshit out of New Dylan: Freewheelin’, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, the Basement Tapes, Blood On the Tracks, and the second-tier joys of Nashville Skyline, Desire, Another Side of Bob Dylan, and John Wesley Harding. New Morning, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and Self Portrait have their moments. Many moments. And many moments unplumbed. Bob Dylan produced so much great music in this era it is almost unreal.
But Bob Dylan in the Sixties and, truly, all the way till his artistic renaissance at the turn of the millennium, was an artist in flux. Completely unfastened to a defining artistic pursuit. A complete unknown indeed, and even to himself.
Many writers can recall their early poems and stories. Maybe you were in your early twenties. You’re consuming all these new ideas, new voices, new forms, excited by the magic of the Romantic poets and Shakespeare and Moby-Dick and Modernist fiction. The Sound and the Fury butts up against John Keats and To the Lighthouse and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and what the hell are you supposed to do with all that? You’re getting high and you’re falling in love and breaking hearts and breaking your own. There’s a wild new world and there was the world before it and you are not moving with it so much as it’s cycloning about you and you produce your early work in a psychedelic haze. Dylan, in his 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley, explains that his early songs were “almost magically written.” He quotes from “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” and then he dares us, dares himself: “Try to sit down and write something like that. There’s a magic to that … It’s a different kind of penetrating magic … I did it once, and I can do other things now. But, I can’t do that.”
He moved on from the magical prose of “It’s Alright, Ma” rather quickly. Rapidly shifting into other zones. Sure, his choices in the Sixties could be glorified as pure rebellion, and I’m down with that notion. The illusion of cool is necessary for the diet, and I’ll eat it whenever anybody with a microphone or a typewriter’s got it. But he was really not as much a rebel as a searcher. For the most part, our most enigmatic and interesting artist of the past hundred years took almost forty years to find his true voice. Writers of poetry and fiction can sympathize. Most musicians cannot. They bang out their best work young and if they don’t burn out they fade away.
Dylan, being a literary practitioner as much as a song-and-dance-man — a chronicler, if you will — found his true voice not with his late career breakout Time Out of Mind (still a perfect album, the deliriously beautiful “Not Dark Yet” a top contender for Best Dylan Song) but did so a few years later, producing his own work under the pseudonym Jack Frost, and released an album that is a pastiche of early Twentieth Century Southern music and Vaudeville and everything, everything Old, Weird America-y and even pre-Rockabilly, the cultural wellspring from which the young Bob Dylan and his Sixties peers emerged.
A chronicler, Dylan figured out in the new millennium that his true calling was to be a pastiche-man, the only Twenty-first Century aging bard just genius and laser-focused enough to cook it all up and distill it. And so he, of course, went deep into the American South. A midwestern boy, Robert Zimmerman wasn’t born the most likely candidate. But Dylan learned long ago that — and boy did he have to keep working for it — the most American thing you could do was wipe the slate clean. Many try it. But Dylan is better than all of us because he took that distinctly American notion of personal reinvention and affixed it solely upon the pursuit of artistic mastership.
As the Twenty-first Century began, Bob Dylan was finally ready. Ready to define, and pay homage to, the prior century from which he took shape. And to define a place: The American South. Because Bob Dylan knew, as the Rolling Stones did with Exile On Main Street, that all great American music largely gestated in the American South, and that while his nascent idol Woody Guthrie wrote ballads and folk tunes and protest music during the horrific 1930s and ‘40s — throughout the Dust Bowl and the Depression and World War II — Dylan knew that something wilder had occurred in the shadow-laden Southern United States, a primal art of personal sorrow and hauntedness and exuberance in the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans and the low-shouldered, brushy mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky and the Cumberland Plateau. In the Wild Country. In the Lost Country.
Love and Theft arrived on the heels of a serious comeback. It had a lot to live up to: Time Out of Mind was better than anything he’d done since Blood On the Tracks. There was a textural darkness to it. Lovelorn and world-weary and confessional. Did I hear someone tell a lie? Did I hear someone’s distant cry? I spoke like a child. You destroyed me with a smile while I was sleeping. Awash in Daniel Lanois’s dreamy, cathedral-noir production style, Time Out of Mind felt more singular and cohesive than much of what he’d done before. There’s a slapdash quality to his best early work, a product of its time and the studio technology available then and Bob’s own youth and wayward spirit, the chain-smoking and the pill-popping. With Lanois, Dylan rendered a record which consistently sounds like a sad, sepia barroom in a disenchanted underwater cave — with mud floors.
Lyrically, it sowed the seeds for what would come next. Alex Ross, in his 1999 New Yorker profile of Dylan, wrote of Time Out of Mind, pointing out that Dylan’s world “manages to skip the twentieth century. Trains discourage gambling, people ride in buggies, there’s no air conditioning (“it’s too hot to sleep”), church bells ring, “gay” means happy, the time of day is measured by the sun, lamps apparently run on gas (and are turned “down low”) and, most of the time, the singer is walking.” True, yet he was hardly skipping the Twentieth Century.
What he was doing was heading down South, a place in which, beyond the turn of the century and through the Depression, church bells were ringing, and people still drove buggies and it was definitely too hot to sleep. And Blind Willie Johnson was lowing and moaning “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” and Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a highway crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and that Lomax boy was racing around with his truck full of gadgets and an enigmatic bluesman named Charley Patton was plucked from the Delta by Paramount Records to lay down “Pony Blues” and “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues” and “Down the Dirt Road Blues.”
Gonna walk down that dirt road, till someone’ll let me ride / Gonna walk down that dirt road, till someone’ll let me ride / If I can’t find my baby I’m gonna run away and hide / Well I’ve been pacing round the room, hopin’ maybe she’ll come back / pacing round the room, hoping maybe she’ll come back / Well I been prayin’ for salvation, layin’ round in a one-room country shack
— Dylan’s “Dirt Road Blues,” Time Out of Mind
Once Dylan dropped Lanois and started producing his own music, and crafting a vision singularly his, he assembled a band whose drummer David Kempler recalls a recording experience in which “you are in the School of Bob … he would bring in … these amazing examples of early Americana … Nobody that I know knows as much about American music as Bob Dylan. He has spent so much time trying to understand, and collecting these songs — it was like a never stopping resource.”
And so Dylan tried on different hats, and eventually wound up being an apolitical collector of musical ephemera, and, due to his outrageous talent, was able to compose a synthesis of Americana art, not just the Southern music of the early Twentieth Century, but a lyrical odyssey upon which vagabonds and barkers and boxcar hoppers and Mardi Gras paraders and outlaws and the lovelorn lost souls and Kerouacian road romantics and ramblers and card-sharks and Tweedly Dum and Tweedly Dee and that backstabbing phony Mr. Goldsmith and duck-trapping granddads and folks who’ve “got a cravin’ love for blazin’ speed got a hopped up Mustang Ford” (he’s got eight carburetors, and boys he’s usin’ ‘em all) — the souls of the Old Weird America roamed here, upon a land in which coffins dropped in the street like balloons made out of lead and the fog’s so thick you can’t spy the land.
The music itself is as carnivalesque as Bob’s rambunctious, learned and wickedly witty lyrical ziplines — as kaleidoscopic yet far more focused than “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “It’s Alright, Ma” and “Tombstone Blues” — firing a forge in which Delta and Jump Blues and Tin Pan Alley and Rockabilly and Western Swing and swoony Jazz all form a distinct blade wielded by a man method acting in pencil mustaches and a Boss of the Plains hat and a Western-cut leisure suit: Dylan Revisited.
In Love and Theft’s opening track “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” the music fades in, like the album itself emerging from a paper lantern-lit bayou bog; a conga-like percussive rumble and a fat, driving humbucked boogie-woogie lick sets the streetcar named desire down the long highway of Bob Dylan’s new, cantankerous and variegated masterclass of Americana. His vocals surface, tactfully reverberated, a croaking daemon trickster of the Lost Highway, some whole new iteration who’s tossed the frayed, weary voice of Time Out of Mind in the trash and risen up rumbling and tumbling and cackling and crooning with incredible authority, and perfectly calibrated — a master of the long vowel, Bobby utilizing, as always, his voice as an instrument. The lyrics almost wouldn’t matter if they weren’t so good.
As he would continue to do on its follow-up Modern Times, and, barring his detour into Sinatra standards, on all his proper studio albums ending (for now) with Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan peppers his lyrics with references to a cornucopia of literature and music and public figures that defined that most undefinable (and defining) era of this vast, weird country.
In “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” our vagabond namesake characters are “…going to the country, they’re gonna retire, they’re taking a streetcar named desire” and one says to the other “His Master’s Voice is calling me” and the narrator’s got “rain beating down on my window pane, I got love for you and it’s all in vain” — in the space of a couple of minutes Dylan references Tennessee Williams, Robert Johnson and Francis Barraud’s painting “His Master’s Voice,” an 1889 work in which a small white dog sticks its snout into the bell of a gramophone, which would later become the iconic logo for the Victor Talking Machine in 1900 and thereafter RCA Victor’s vinyl pressings. It’s that nod to Barraud’s painting which is the key to the album, a key to Dylan.
What better way to introduce the mission of Love and Theft than a sly, unnoticeable nod to an 1889 painting — and how unpretentious; he could’ve referenced Monet or Cézanne or Modigliani or Picasso — a painting that became a piece of early analog recording iconography, and remained so well into modern times. It’s unnoticeable because Dylan’s turn of phrase seems to point towards something biblical (and, for us, it surely does), a message from God: His Master’s Voice is calling me, said Tweedly Dumb to Tweedly Dee. You’d think it’s something metaphysically grand and yet what Dylan’s done is grander. This is his religion.
The album’s second track, “Mississippi,” would be almost perturbingly exquisite if it wasn’t so moving. It’s a literary masterclass in structure and restraint and movement and dynamism, told in the first person by a romantic tramp who “got here followin’ the Southern Star” who’d “crossed that river just to be where you are.” Sonically, it’s a mid-tempo walk down that lonesome road in which Dylan’s vocals are so expertly modulated — the long, croaking, snide vowels impossible to describe — and so imbued with incandescent longing and wisdom and well-traveled derring-do, that the in-the-pocket tact of his band is almost an afterthought upon the first few listens. It is an astonishing achievement in craftsmanship, and a sober follow-up to a rollicking opening track whose inaugural lines depict two vaudevillian psychopaths traveling with “two big bags of dead man’s bones” with their noses to the grindstone. Juxtaposed against “Tweedle Dee & Tweddle Dum,” “Mississippi” establishes Love and Theft’s tight-rope balance between raucousness and elegance.
I will not describe the rest of the album song for song, not in much detail. A Master’s thesis could be written of “High Water (for Charley Patton)” (on what, I don’t know), but I’ve only described briefly the two opening tracks’ grandeur to convey what must be ascertained by listening to the album in full, and with full attention: Love and Theft is Dylan’s masterpiece. His Master’s Voice is Calling Thee.
The great writer, musician and music historian Elijah Wald might give me a scolding for over-praising, and thus romanticizing, Dylan — an artist who should not be cheapened as some mythical figure. Rather, Dylan is a uniquely skilled writer and composer and self-taught music scholar, and ought to be considered in that regard. And that’s a notion with which I’m in full agreement. The achievement of Love and Theft is pure handiwork and finesse. And this is why his modern work is more accomplished than his “magical” writings of yesteryear.
Wald, in books like Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, does an admirable job demystifying Delta legends of the ‘20s and ‘30s — like Robert Johnson, who “was not a demon-harried oddity from the primeval delta, but a brilliant and savvy pop musician, and he deserves to be respected as such, rather than worshiped as a weird rock deity.” Yet Wald admits that “in some ways the myths are just as important as the reality.” Dylan understands this as well, and it’s the Robert Johnson who sold his soul to the devil, and the inevitable mythologizing of an era which must occur by the distance of a hundred years, that gives his lyrics and compositions their color and verve and wildness. It gives us hope that something stranger, something more artful and surreal roils beneath the surface of that which can always be reduced to a non-fictive over-realism under more academic scrutiny. The mystery beneath, that’s what the music’s here for. Film. Fiction.
In his pursuit of demystification, Wald also points out that many Black Delta musicians of the era were only more fastened to the blues by pressures of the industry and our own modern romanticization of them, of specters like Charley Patton.
Remembered by history as a blues musician, Patton had grown up in the pre-blues era, and he played the full range of music required by a popular rural entertainer … only about half of his roughly fifty records can reasonably be considered part of [the blues]. The others are a mix of gospel and religious music, ragtime comedy … and a couple of unclassifiable pieces that seem to be his reimaginings of Tin Pan Alley pop …
This was not a particularly unusual repertoire for the time and place. Back in those days before recorded entertainment, rural musicians were expected to perform whatever their audiences cared to hear, and many of them mastered an extraordinary range of styles …
Dylan gets this one too. Whether Love and Theft’s pursuit is one of homage to folks like Patton, or an attempt at kinship — to be a peer amongst his heroes — Dylan achieves this more faithfully than most for the album’s breadth of styles, styles conjured from Patton’s lifecycle. The swingy ballad “Po’ Boy” (which, characteristic of the album as a whole, contains multitudes: references to Shakespeare’s Othello and a Vaudevillian knock-knock joke), the apocalyptic bluegrass of “High Water (For Charley Patton)” (which, notably, is bereft of any apparent blues styling yet dedicated to Patton nonetheless, giving credence to Wald’s thesis), the breezy, brushy, Billie Holiday-style jazz and pre-rock pop of “Bye and Bye” and “Moonlight,” and then there’s the unclassifiably weird “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” which borrows melodies and motifs from Bing Crosby. “Sugar Baby” cops its title from Appalachian folk singer Dock Boggs. “Summer Days” plays like a mashup of Rockabilly and Western Swing. The only true blues stompers on the record are “Cry a While,” “Lonesome Day Blues,” and perhaps the ripping “Honest With Me.” Across a span of fifty-seven minutes, Dylan covers a hell of a lot of ground.
The big caveat here is that Love and Theft is a masterpiece, yet it’s not everyone’s masterpiece. And a great argument can be made — and most often will be made — for the primacy of early Dylan. To adore Love and Theft and Modern Times and Together Through Life and Tempest and Rough and Rowdy Ways you have to be looking for it.
It is the selfsame pursuit by which Dylan conjures his late-period American epics: a lust for American roots music, and for a country’s mysteries and oddities and absurdities and a reasonable longing for what Greil Marcus, the granddaddy of the Elijah Walds of the world, coined as “the old, weird America” in Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. This is what Dylan wanted to conquer. If he’d backtracked to his protest days, maybe fallen under the spell of the quarrelsome internet berserkers of the 2010s, he would’ve been well-reviewed but boy it would’ve stunk. (He’s very, very well-reviewed anyway.) You could dismiss him for not doing that, dismiss him as a sociopolitically hush-hush rich old codger sitting in his Malibu mansion (even though this particular old codger really, really deserves to be rich), but that devalues how fully he’s immersed himself in his passions.
Even in his 2022 book The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan completely eschews serious examination of his subjects — sixty-six standards and hidden jewels of the Rock, Pop and Rhythm & Blues canon — in favor of the same prose he uses on his records: authoritative yet colloquial, old fashioned and stingingly witty. He’s not even method acting anymore in that cowboy suit. Maybe he never was. Here is how he begins to unpack “Blue Suede Shoes”:
This song is the handwriting on the wall, loaded with menacing meaning — a signal to gate crashers, snoops, and invaders — keep your nose out of here, mind your own business and whatever you do stay away from my shoes.
You’d like to be on good footing with everyone, but let’s face it, there’s a harshness to your nature that might go unsuspected and it can be downright nasty when it comes to your shoes. Especially when it comes to your shoes.
Your shoes are your pride and joy, sacred and dear, your reason for living, and anyone who scrapes or bruises them is putting himself into jeopardy, accidentally or out of ignorance it doesn’t matter. It’s the one thing in life you won’t forgive. If you don’t believe me, step on them by all means — you won’t like what happens.
For this, The Philosophy of Modern Song is wildly hilarious. Perturbing to some.
In her Los Angeles Times review, Jody Rosen complains that “‘philosophy’ is a useful term, vague and baggy enough to accommodate the mix of music criticism, beat poetry, wolverine snarls and Lear-on-the-heath tirades that comprise the book’s 66 chapters about 66 songs … The Philosophy of Modern Song has its own wild flavor. It is — for better and, alas, worse — a special kind of bonkers.”
Sounds dynamite. But I get it. It does prove, however, that the new Dylan, the cowboy trickster musicologist Dylan, is, finally, exactly who is, exactly who he was born to be. His own version of himself.
In Philosophy, Dylan’s playing a similar role to that of Harry Smith, gonzo mystic-bohemian-addled-Einstein musicologist who’d compiled the seminal and wildly influential Anthology of American Folk Music, in which he prefaced each track conjured up from the underbelly of 78RPMs from the ‘20s and ‘30s with old newspaper headline-style one-liners and zingers like “ZOOLOGIC MISCEGENY ACHIEVED IN MOUSE-FROG NUPTUALS, RELATIVES APPROVE” for “Froggy Went A-Courtin’”.
There’s a wit and stream-of-consciousness frivolity to the Philosophy of Modern Song which renders Dylan-the-author as of a piece with his subjects, their time and place — just as he did with the Band and their basement tapes, that collections of rambunctious roots music recorded covertly in the basement of Big Pink during the Summer of Love, nineteen hundred and sixty-seven, The Basement Tapes the true scrim against which Dylan’s modern folkways crusade rollicks along. Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic (or, as it’s now been reissued, The Old, Weird America) goes into illuminating detail, concerning the record’s place in Bob Dylan’s canon as the springboard for his ongoing elan for that certain music of the old, weird America.
Starting with Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft, there was no real Self Portrait or Street-Legal, no true misfires — or even a New Morning or John Wesley Harding, good albums in their own right but far from Highway 61 Revisited or Blood On The Tracks. I’m not claiming Christmas In the Heart is a masterpiece, but of his proper studio albums, new batches of original material, there’s nothing short of that. Time Out of Mind. Love and Theft. Modern Times. Tempest. Rough and Rowdy Ways. Masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece, masterpiece. (Not to belabor the point.) The possible exception is Together Through Life, whose songs were written in collaboration with the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter, which still showcases Dylan in peak form.
His most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, seals the deal. As accomplished as Love and Theft and Modern Times, the album drives that hopped-up Mustang Ford into an expansion of Dylan’s late period territory, welcoming into the ballroom Frankenstein and Anne Frank and the Scarface Pacino and Philosopher Pirates and obviously Jimmy Reed gets a ticket and so does John F. Kennedy’s corpse, not unlike its predecessor Tempest, which welcomed Jack and Rose from Titanic. With this whole fucking Twilight Zone of poems and dusty 45s and frayed dust jackets and politicians and old Universal pictures and celebrities swirling about his wandering mind you’ve got to wonder if it’s even possible to get to the bottom of how it all works and what he’s actually doing.
He is riding that Mystery Train, is what he’s doing. Along with Elvis and Charley Patton and the Singing Brakeman and Jack and Rose and the ghost of John F. Kennedy. The Mystery Train’s sixteen coaches long and it rambles alongside the misty backroads of the Old, Weird America and it makes many stops. In the dark room of Big Joe Turner’s mind. Sometimes it drives farther back in time, picking up notes from Homer and Ovid. Then picking up speed. If you ride the Mystery Train you can always come back but you can’t come back all the way.
You’ve been shackled by the Phantom Conductor and it might be the man in pencil mustaches and a Boss of the Plains hat. Once formally known as Zimmerman. Dylan and Jack Frost. Whatever phantom shape he chooses once His Master’s Voice comes calling.
Lot of interesting stuff here. Love all the attention to "Love and Theft," my second-favorite Dylan record. But I have to stick up for "Street-Legal," a great album with killer songs.
Need to read this later, but wanted to say— I’ve been a dylan fanatic since the late 70s, and after years of disappointing dylan records with the odd strong cut here and there, I was shocked by TOOM, and I’ve enjoyed every album since. I would not argue these recent albums are as great as his early classics, but if a young newcomer had made those records, he or she would now be the undisputed king or queen of alt country. Underrated Dylan period, and as you suggest, a much longer string of good records than he had ever pulled off before.