BOB DYLAN

First off, if you think he can't sing, you're full of shit.

It's that simple.  It really is.  You may be a very nice person, smart person, tasteful person. You may not like his singing - that is, you may not find it to your personal taste.  Which is just fine - everyone's entitled.  But don't mistake your preferences for facts of life.  Here's what Bono (who's singing I often don't find to my personal taste) had to say about him:


When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth ... To understand Bob Dylan's impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl. It is a vast list, but so were the influences on Dylan, from the Talmudic chanting of Allen Ginsberg in "Howl" to the deadpan Woody Guthrie and Lefty Frizzell's murmur. There is certainly iron ore in there, and the bitter cold of Hibbing, Minnesota, blowing through that voice. It's like a knotted fist, and it allows Dylan to sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality. Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, indignant, jeering, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it's full of wonder and worship. Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience's face and said, "I dare you to think I'm kidding." (Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Singers)

One of the things I like about Bono (and there's a lot of things I don't like about Bono ... he's getting smarter as he gets older.

I. Talkin' New York (1961-63)

Little Bobby Zimmerman grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a place I know nothing about except it's a small town and it's cold.  He loved music and books, apparently; blues and country that broadcast out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and then rock and roll.  He learned guitar and piano and harp, and he formed bands: The Shadow Blasters, the Golden Chords.  He scared his high school principal stomping out an extra loud

"Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at the high school talent show.  The principal, anticipating Pete Seeger a decade or so later, cut the mike.  His idol was Little Richard. After high school he read Bound For Glory and discovered Woody Guthrie.  He decided rock and roll groups weren't making it, so he embraced Woody and became a folk singer.  In later years, when his rock`n'roll past was still a secret, folkies would claim he sold out when he got an electric guitar.  Surprise!  It was when he went folk that he sold out.

In `61 he went to NYC to seek fame and fortune as a folkie.  He found it because he was unique, and original, and irreverent.

Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers up with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent. Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes, and a searing intensity pervades his songs. Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues. "Talking Bear Mountain" lampoons the overcrowding of an excursion boat. "Talking New York" satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and "Talkin' Hava Negilah" burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself. Mr. Dylan's highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess. But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up. (Robert Shelton, 1961)

Dylan became the darling of the folkies, their great white hope, their new Woody.  And he broke their hearts when he left them.  He left them because he had to.  Because he was too big a fish for their little folkie pond. Even today there are those who mutter that he was a fraud, a fake, a phony; he was never any good, he sold out for the big bucks, he was only in it for the money and the fame.  Sounding like jilted teenage romantics, turning on their once-pedestaled-paramours because they left them for something bigger and better.  It doesn't matter worth a god-damn if Richard Farina or Eric Andersen or Tom Paxton or Dave Van Ronk or Eric Von Schmidt or Koerner Ray and Glover or Joan Baez were "better" (as musicians, as writers, as whatever).  Dylan could, and did, do things artistically, that they could never have done.  They all made some nice records.  Dylan made epochal ones.

It was true even with album number one.  Other white folksingers of the era, including his older contemporaries Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk, had incorporated blues in their work, says Allmusic,  but Dylan's presentation was more in your face...There's a punk-like aggressiveness to the singing and playing here. His raspy-voiced delivery and guitar style were modeled largely on Guthrie's classic '40s and early-'50s recordings, but the assertiveness of the bluesmen he admires also comes out, making this one of the most powerful records to come out of the folk revival of which it was a part. Within a year of its release, Dylan, initially in tandem with young folk/protest singers like Peter, Paul & Mary and Phil Ochs, would alter the boundaries of that revival beyond recognition

The difference is, Dylan never really was a folkie.  He was a rock`n'roll singer who assimilated folk music, and coughed it back up, his way.  His ambition went way beyond the Folk Revival.  And his talent allowed him to reach for it.  He reached and he got it on Freewheelin', his early `63 second album.  "Blowin' in the Wind" gave the Folkie Revival its greatest anthem.  "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" made him a poet.  Even the cover was epochal.

Essential Listening:

Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Live At The Gaslight 1962
No Direction Home
The Minnesota Tapes
Live 1964 - Concert At Philharmonic Hall
The Witmark Demos

Reading:

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña by David Hajdu 
Young Bob: John Cohen's Early Photographs of Bob Dylan

II. Another Side (1964)

And, like many ambitious artists, when he saw he had the reach, he knew he had to reach farther.  So he threw the folkies one more bone with The Times They Are A-Changing, a holding effort, and shut himself in the studio one summer night and turned out Another Side Of Bob Dylan.  And he blew off the protest songs and threw off the suit the folkies had tried to sew him into.  They were very pissed off.  The songs were personal, and surreal, full of strange characters and stranger events, and imagery.  His appearance had altered, too, and his attitude.

In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan's appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary songwriter of the folk scene to folk-rock pop-music star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day or night, and pointy "Beatle boots". A London reporter wrote: "Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo." Dylan also began to spar in increasingly surreal ways with his interviewers. Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, "No, I play my mother." (Wikipedia)

Another Side Of Bob Dylan
Biograph
The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3


III. Bring It On Home (1965-1966)

So he bought himself an electric guitar.  He showed up at the Newport Folk Festival with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band behind him.  He got booed ... for playing electric, for poor sound, for too short a set ... reports vary.  He was defiant.  His new music owed as much to Chuck Berry, and the hard Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as to Woody Guthrie.  His songs were surreal beat poetry set to clanging, cacophonous blues-rock.  He did not back down.  Joan Baez trotted after him like a puppy until he finally kicked her off, ending his status as folk-darling forever (how dare you abuse the princess?!?).  The folkies slagged him in print.  He responded with "Positively 4th Street," a musical "go-fuck-yourself." "Something is happening and you don't know what it is," he sneered, at a hidebound audience that couldn't keep up with him.  He didn't need them.  He kept on getting bigger and better, and he blew minds.  "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind" said Bruce Springsteen of "Like A Rolling Stone" He went to Nashville with members of Ronnie Hawkins backing band and laid down Blonde On Blonde,  "that thin wild mercury sound". Al Kooper described the album as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical world of Nashville and the world of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.  He toured Europe.  Folk purists booed.  He told the band to
"play fucking loud."  Then he went back to upstate NY with his new wife, and threw himself over the handles of his motorcycle.  And he vanished.  And the world went psychedelic.

Bringing It All Back Home
Highway 61 Revisited
Blonde On Blonde

Biograph
The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3
Live 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert
No Direction Home

IV. It Came From Woodstock (1967-1969)

He holed up in Woodstock with his friends from Ronnie's band, and they sat around and recorded a bunch of lo-fi demos which built quite a rep, first as bootlegs, then in some official releases, as The Basement Tapes.  Despite their glorious rep, they sound to my ears like a bunch of low-key, lo-fi demos of good songs that might have been great if they'd really cut loose on them.  They didn't.  Instead he went back to Nashville and cut John Wesley Harding, "a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape that drew on both the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture."  It was his most mature album of the 60's.  I think it's one of his very best.

He stayed off the road.  He followed JWH with Nashville Skyline, one of his worst.  But it was a huge hit.

John Wesley Harding
The Basement Tapes
A Tree With Roots

V. What is This Shit? (1970-1974)

He stayed home and cut a record just about every year.  Most were modest.  There were some good, but minor, songs.  Some were outright bad.  Rolling Stone savaged him.  He had peaked.  In `74 he did a tour with The Band, who needed their own shot in the arm.  It proved he still knew how to rock.

VI. Lost But Now I'm Found (1975-1976)

He and Sara went their separate ways.  He went to New York with a notebook full of new songs and winged it.  "(he would) go from one song to another like a medley. Sometimes he will have several bars, and in the next version, he will change his mind about how many bars there should be in between a verse. Or eliminate a verse. Or add a chorus when you don't expect" said Phil Ramone, engineer on the session.  The album was a classic, a collection of acoustic soul and blues, JWH with a harder edge, it told stories of men and women, the things we do (for)(to) love, love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love.  It was heartache and heartbreak, anger and grief, despair.  But it ended with a new morning, and a new love.  It was classic.

He was on a good roll again.  He did the Rolling Thunder tour.  He cut Desire, a good follow-up.  He got divorced.  He did a half-hearted TV Special.  He cut a much lesser album called Street Legal (like all Dylan albums, some people call it their favorite).  He made a much-reviled live album in Japan (like all Dylan albums, some people call it their favorite).  He was lost again.

Blood On The Tracks
Desire
Live 1975

VII. People Let Me Tell Ya `Bout The Kingdom Come (1979-1981)

One night he found a cross laying on the stage and picked it up.  He got converted.  He cut Slow Train Coming, a musically sold but often tiresome bit of evangelizing.  Charles Shaar Murray wrote, "Bob Dylan has never seemed more perfect and more impressive than on this album. He has also never seemed more unpleasant and hate-filled." Greil Marcus wrote, "Dylan's received truths never threaten the unbeliever, they only chill the soul" and accused Dylan of "sell[ing] a prepackaged doctrine he's received from someone else." (Wikipedia).  He followed it with the even more (self)righteous Saved.  He toured, refusing to play any older songs.  Fans booed and screamed they wanted Dylan.  As Greil Marcus pointed out, they had him.  As always, he was going his way and his way only as an artist.  And you were welcome to come along.  Or not.

Biograph

VIII. I Was Found But Now I'm Lost (1982-1990)

Shot Of Love toned down his righteousness for a more listenable experience.  Curiously, it contained his best  song of faith, "Every Grain Of Sand".  Infidels was supposedly his return to "secular" music.  It was minor, but it was stronger (big blunder, he left "Blind Willie McTell," the best song he'd recorded since Blood On The Tracks, in the can for close to ten years).  Late one night he turned up on David Letterman, and proved he still had it.

He began to open the vaults.  The box set Biograph included a few crumbs from the cake of his wealth of unreleased material, from album outtakes and bedrooms pisstakes c. 1961-1964 to outtakes and live takes from the `65-`66 albums and tours.  Much of this had been leaked on bootlegs, especially the grand Ten Of Swords, but here it was in good sound and on good vinyl, and you could buy it at the local record store, too!

He wandered.  He made album after album.  Most included an inspired moment or two, but most were weak.  He often left his best songs on the cutting room floor.  He toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, then G.E. Smith.  He played Live Aid and Farm Aid.  He joined the Traveling Wilburys. He starred in a bad, all-but forgotten movie (Hearts On Fire).  His voice became pinched and sharp and nasal, as if he'd been sucking helium.

But the fire could never be completely quenched.  Most often he was desultory, but occasionally, he could be brilliant.  When he managed a bit of consistency on the album Oh Mercy in 1989, it was hailed as a return to form (as had every bright spot in this lean decade ... as had every bright spot in every lean decade).  But Under The Red Sky (1990) was dismissed as a joke, his worst ever (and there was plenty of competition).  When his next album was a collection of folk covers, even diehards like me figured it was over.  I did fork over for The Bootleg Series Vol. 1, though.

Biograph
The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3
Oh Mercy

(hey, he did "License To Kill" that night, and its awesome.  Why that's not on Youtube I'll never know!)

IX. The Old, Weird America (1992-1998)

Sometime around 1994 I saw a video for "Blood In My Eyes," from his 1993 World Gone Wrong, his second album of folk covers (in a row).  Originally performed by the Mississippi Sheiks.  Son of a bitch it was beautiful.  Okay ... maybe he would never write another great song. But damn ... the old fucker still had it.  He had more of it than he a right to have.  I heard something.  I wasn't alone...

(Greil) Marcus became a real fan again in the early 1990s when Dylan released “Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong,” two unassuming, acoustic albums of folk standards. “I can’t put too much emphasis” on those albums, Marcus told me animatedly. “Something different was going on. It’s the great turning point.” Marcus was dazzled by Dylan’s total performance on the two records – “he never played guitar like that before. He was going back to these very old songs that had been his repertoire in ‘59, ‘60, ‘61. He was saying, ‘These songs still have so much to tell me. I still have so much to tell about these songs. His own music remains an undiscovered country.” (Jon Friedman quoting Greil Marcus in Speakeasy).

...most of these old tunes he gooses or caresses to some kind of arousal--he clearly knows the sensitive spots of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" and the antiredcoat jig "Arthur McBride." Not that he thinks such intimacy yields a self-portrait. Older than that now, he merely explores a world of song whose commonness and strangeness he knows he'll never comprehend. Dylan's second attempt to revive the folk music revival while laying down a new record without writing any new songs is eerie and enticing. He cherishes the non sequiturs, sudden changes of heart, and received or obscure blank spots in these buried songs--all usages he's long since absorbed into his own writing because he believes they evoke a world that defies rationalization. Me, I'm not so sure it doesn't just seem that way because there's no way we can be intimate with their worlds anymore. And while only a crank could resist his liner notes, that doesn't mean it isn't cranky in the extreme to hold, for instance, that the two-timing aristo who gets his in "Love Henry" is "modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his `psychosis' responsible for organizing the Intelligentsia," und so weiter. We do not live in "the New Dark Ages." And if we did, Dylan would call out for rationalization right quick (Robert Christgau)

Something was happening.  And I didn't know what it was.

In the summer of 1998 he was hospitalized with a heart infection.  I thought we might lose him.  I started to listen for pleasure again.  In September, Time Out Of Mind was released.  By now, with every other album a “return to form,” all but the most loyal Dylan-ists had long since given up the ghost.  So, naturally, this time it turned out to be true.  A mournful tramp through meditations on mortality and American folk culture, Robert Johnson meeting Robbie Robertson and leading a New Orleans funeral parade, all culminating in “Highlands,” an endless (16-minute) wander that left Dylan and the listener still lost, still searching, perhaps for all time.

Good As I Been To You
World Gone Wrong
Time Out Of Mind

XI. Storm Warning (2001-?)

He provided a song for the wonderful soundtrack of the even-more wonderful Wonder Boys. The wild rambler of “Highlands” returned, just as lost and mighty pissed off about what he’d found.  But he stopped to collect his Oscar.

On September 11, 2001, he released Love and Theft.  It was supposed to be a big deal ... there had even been commercials aired for its release (now that's a rarity). It’s much-anticipated release having the misfortune to fall on That Fateful Day, it ran the risk of commercial failure.  It survived by virtue of being the funniest, sharpest, and most butt-rocking album he’d dished out since Blonde On Blonde.  Hard, brutal blues, occasionally leavened by gentle, tongue-in-cheek 20’s pop parodies and some of the silliest wordplay ever (from a guy with a rep for silly wordplay).  In typical Dylan fashion, it was also prophetic; “High Water Everywhere” was dedicated to Charlie Patton, but it’s ominous cadences recalled “All Along the Watchtower,” and were just as sure a warning of the stormy weather ahead.

Since then, he has released an album every few years.  While none have quite risen to the heights of these last two, all have been good. Even the 2008 Tell Tale Signs, a collection of outtakes from this same period, is consistently damn good.   His voice has gone to a hard, Tom Waits-ian rasp.  His songs remain storm warnings.

He sounds like himself. He sounds sly, as he’s always sounded. He sounds as if there’s a twinkle in his eye; as if there’s a joke he’s letting you in on, maybe halfway, and you’ll have to find your way to the end of the joke yourself. That’s pretty much been his mode all along. And he sounds utterly eager to keep exploring the unanswered questions of the music that has captivated him for a long time. Mostly that has been the old, old American folk music that first transformed him when he left behind Robert Zimmerman and became Bob Dylan in Minneapolis in the late fifties and very early sixties.(Greil Marcus)

He remains who he is.  He has become a great American artist.  Whether you loathe or love him, his voice, his politics, or anything else, this is a fact.


Bono again: The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the Voice of a Generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground — these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes — that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.

Wonder Boys (soundtrack)
Love and Theft
Modern Times
Tell Tale Signs
Together Through Life
Tempest

Links


Bob Dylan Allmusic
Bob Dylan Wiki
Bobdylan.com

Expecting Rain
Bringing It All Back Homepage
I Happen To Be A Swede Myself
Searching For A Gem
Annotated Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan mailing list
Mybackpages
Bringingitallbackhomeclub
Positively4thStreet
Expectingrain mailing list
Skipping Reels of Rhyme


Reading:

Chronicles, Vol. One
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus
Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades

Viewing:

No Direction Home
Don't Look Back