That is not a modern concept. But Dylan, who was once absolutely the Latest Word on the Cutting Edge of the Hippest Hip, is not a modern guy. (The "authentic alternative lifestyle," he announces in the sprawling notes he penned for World Gone Wrong, is "the Agrarian one.") Of course, like most people, he prefers the modes and heroes of his youth, sometimes to the point of crankiness, and, like all millenarians, he sees evidence of the End Times everywhere. ("Strange things are happ'nin," he sings at the album's head, "like never before.") His gloss on these songs is consistently apocalyptic. But this doesn't mean you shouldn't take him seriously; you may come to believe the same. You may now. "I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom," Dylan told Cameron Crowe for the notes to Biograph (source of most of the quotes below). Or, as he once quotably sang, "To live outside the law you must be honest." In the critical world of these songs, where lovers would die for love and a man is killed over a hat (and don't think that doesn't happen where you live), all feelings are ardent and no action is without consequence -- quite a notion in a time when so many seem to get away with so much for so little. Folk music is where Dylan first made his mark, as a charismatically scruffy tyro in a milieu mostly well-groomed and with a tendency to be oversolemn when not intently "fun." (Let's all sing!) And he was also personally ambitious in a way his more communally minded peers were not, which ensured that he would not remain part of that community long. But he never abandoned the music. Most of his early and many of his later compositions steal folk melodies and lyrical schemes and motifs; which is only what Woody Guthrie did, and Woody was Dylan's first serious professional role model. "I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves," Dylan says in the notes to his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. "I hope to be able to someday...." Listening to World Gone Wrong, you'd swear he's made it. Though it's all too easy to reduce this record, like last year's Good As I Been to You, to a ho-hum High Concept -- Bob Returns to His Roots -- or even a Desperate Step Backward, World Gone Wrong transcends quick dismissal at every step. It is beautifully performed (maybe his best sustained vocalizing since Blood on the Tracks), thoughtfully programmed (the songs support the album title) and, despite some less than perfectly played guitar licks, utterly lacking the apparent disregard that's lately characterized Dylan's approach to his own songs (most famously his in-concert trashing of melody and clumping of lyrics into little balls of undifferentiated nasality). Nothing seems to wake him up lately like a song someone else wrote -- even more, a song that no one else wrote, songs that, like these, are obscure in origin and communally refined, that are not the work of a person (and are therefore dust), but of The People. "I think that this world is just a passing-through place and that the dead have eyes and even the unborn can see, and I don't care who knows it," he has said. "I like to stay a part of the stuff that don't change."
Dylan's self-titled first album, released in 1962 before he turned 20 and before any but a small congregation of Greenwich Village clubgoers had ever heard or heard of him (a state of affairs that record did not do much to change), was, with once exception, also composed of folk and blues covers. But it's a world away from World Gone Wrong. In those green days, he was a kid clomping around in Daddy's shoes. He lied about his past to make it more romantic. He made his voice hoarse in order to sound older, experienced, hard-traveled. He wasn't like anyone else on the scene -- he was more aggressive, hungrier, and he liked rock & roll (he was a motorcycle-riding sort of troubadour) -- but he wasn't exactly himself yet, either. Then came "Blowin' in the Wind" and "Like a Rolling Stone" and as much fame and probably more influence than any other pop singer ever has had (or could reasonably handle). Thirty years in show business, 30 years of people trying to get inside his head, of relentless analysis of his every song and statement, of bootlegs and boos and drugs and God and flops and comebacks and marriage and divorce and too much power and too little slack and as high a standard as anyone has ever been expected to meet. Now, on World Gone Wrong, he revisits that early territory like a man who's earned the ticket. This is just where he lives now. It's no act. He walks the walk. He sings like a man who can't sleep at night. He pours himself out of himself into songs that were old ages before he took the name Dylan. And somehow he sounds younger than ever. There is no definitive version of a folk song; it lives and breathes and changes its shape while remaining true to its soul. You can see Dylan's constant in-concert recasting (or, if you prefer, ruining) of his own recorded compositions as being meant to keep his songs from drying into artifacts -- he sings them as if he learned them from someone else (and not too carefully). As if they were folk songs. Ironically, the popular folk-music "revival" of Dylan's youth was a relatively rigid, sectarian and politicized affair that unwittingly celebrated the end of the music rather than its continuing good health. "There won't be songs like this anymore," Dylan writes in his album notes, "factually there aren't any now." Apart from nursery rhymes and children's songs (check out Dylan's version of "Froggie Went A-Courting" on Good As I Been to You and "This Old Man" on the 1991 For Our Children benefit album), what's left of the oral tradition in America but celebrity gossip and tales of spider-filled boils? If this isn't yet the End of All Time, it's nevertheless the end of an era. In the more than three decades since Dylan bought his first harmonica rack, most of the remaining "real" folk singers have died. (Folk singer now means Bob Dylan-influenced, as likely as not.) Franchises and television have flattened regional culture. Within Dylan's lifetime, large blocks of the country did not have electricity or the telephone. Now we've grown used to remote control, instant global communication. We expect our computers to fix our mistakes. We live disposably. To Dylan, this all spells Last Days. And so the singer turns to the songs that abide. (Never mind that they're mostly obscure, they live large in his mind.) The voice he applies to them is a little time-worn, but freshened by an absolute conviction of the present reality of these tales of love and death and magic and murder, faith and fear. He sounds humble, egoless (qualities not traditionally associated with this particular singer, not even in his Christian "phase"), terribly sweet and immensely private. No hint of a hootenanny here -- as affecting as these performances are, you can hardly call them "entertainment." He might be singing purely for himself, as he looks upon the world from inside these old songs and considers just how marvelous and awful it is to be human.¶ |
Copyright Robert Lloyd © 1993 and 2006