Now that Bob Dylan has the #1 album in America (not bad for an old 60s geezer), here’s a reflection on him, and a review of the album

1. BOB ON BOB
Dylan talks.
by LOUIS MENAND (from The New Yorker)

“Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews”—I’m not sure those are words that make the heart beat faster. “ Dylan nil a me alienum puto ,” as Terence put it (or would have put it, if he had lived long enough): nothing having to do with Dylan can be alien to me. Still, as an interview subject, Dylan probably ranks a few notches above Elvis, who was one of the all-time worst. The trouble with Elvis was that he had very little to say; he was mainly concerned about sounding polite. Dylan is rarely concerned about sounding polite, and he says things, but he sometimes makes them up. He also contradicts himself, answers questions with questions, rambles, gets hostile, goes laconic, and generally bewilders. What makes it truly frustrating is that, somewhere in the stream of inconsequence and obstreperousness, there are usually a few nuggets of gold. The nuggets make interviewers think that the other stuff must be a put-on, that Dylan could speak with the tongue of angels all the time if he wanted to, and this makes them press harder, hoping that the next question will break through the misdirection and resistance, and the man in front of them will turn into “Bob Dylan.” Since there is nothing Dylan likes less than being mistaken for “Bob Dylan”—“If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers,” he once said—this is not a productive interview dynamic.

“The Essential Interviews” (Wenner; $23.95) was assembled by Jonathan Cott, a longtime contributor to Rolling Stone and Dylan idolater unabashed. The book collects thirty-one pieces, not all of which are interviews of the Q. & A. type. They include Nat Hentoff’s New Yorker Profile of Dylan, from 1964; a precociously observant report by Jay Cocks, for a campus publication, on Dylan’s visit to Kenyon College in 1964; a funny, completely insane piece by A. J. Weberman, the man who is famous for sorting through Dylan’s garbage, which first appeared in the East Village Other, in 1971; a selection from Robert Shelton’s biography of Dylan, “No Direction Home,” a work fairly described as sprawling, which came out in 1986; and a deft and atmospheric dramatic dialogue by Sam Shepard, which was published in Esquire in 1987. Of the more conventional interviews, seven are from Rolling Stone (two of them conducted by Cott), three are from the Los Angeles Times (all with Robert Hilburn, the paper’s pop-music editor), and two are from Playboy .

The discrepancy between Dylan the interview subject and Dylan the musician is not an artifact of celebrity. It seems to have been part of the deal from the start, and it’s almost the first thing that people who knew him mention when they’re asked about their initial impression. “I wanted to meet the mind that created all those beautiful words,” Judy Collins told David Hajdu for “Positively 4th Street,” his delightful group biography of Dylan, Richard Fariña, and Joan and Mimi Baez. “We set something up, and we had coffee, and when it was over, I walked away, thinking, ‘The guy’s an idiot. He can’t make a coherent sentence.’ ” The first time Joan Baez heard Dylan sing one of his own songs—he played “With God on Our Side” for her—she was floored. “I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad,” she said. She proceeded to fall madly in love with him, and bought him a toothbrush.

People who have this experience with Dylan tend to conclude that he is a complicated human being, but the logical conclusion is the opposite one. Shelton, for his biography, interviewed a man named Harry Weber, who knew, and didn’t especially like, Dylan in Minneapolis, back in 1959, when Dylan was a student (sort of) at the University of Minnesota. “Dylan is a genius, that’s all,” Weber said. “He is not more complex than most people; he is simpler.” On most subjects that normal people talk about, Dylan seems either not to have views or to have views indistinguishable from the views of everyone else who’s hanging around the coffeehouse. His conversation is short and not always sweet. But there is one topic he does like. He is a songwriter. He likes to talk about songs. When interviewers figure this out, the work gets easier.

Of course, many of Dylan’s interviewers want to talk about songs, too, Dylan’s songs. Often, they try to get him to interpret them, but Dylan does not think that songs were meant to be interpreted, so this line of questioning can lead to some ugly dialectical moments. “What’s your new album about?” Dylan was asked during a televised press conference in San Francisco in 1965. “Oh, it’s about, uh—just about all kinds of different things—rats, balloons. They’re about the only thing that comes to my mind right now,” he said. He was talking about “Blonde on Blonde.” It got worse:

Mr. Dylan, how would you define folk music?
As a constitutional re-play of mass production.
Would you call your songs “folk songs”?
No.
Are protest songs “folk songs” ?
I guess, if they’re a constitutional re-play of mass production.
Do you prefer songs with a subtle or obvious message ?
With a what???
A subtle or obvious message ?
Uh—I don’t really prefer those kinds of songs at all—“message”—you mean like—what songs with a message?
Well, like “Eve of Destruction” and things like that.
Do I prefer that to what?
I don’t know, but your songs are supposed to have a subtle message .
Subtle message???
Well, they’re supposed to.
Where’d you hear that?

As the exchange suggests, Dylan was a put-down artist in the early years of his fame. Some of his best songs from the period are put-downs of a scorched-earth type: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Positively 4th Street,” “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Just Like a Woman”—not works that exude the usual pop sentiments. In the infamous D. A. Pennebaker documentary about Dylan’s 1965 British tour, “Don’t Look Back,” Dylan is seen turning poor Donovan into a quivering bowl of Jell-O. You feel that you would not have wanted to get on the wrong side of this guy. The indifference to other people’s sensibilities contributed to the belief, which has shadowed Dylan for much of his career, that he was an opportunist.


Dylan started out as an acolyte of Woody Guthrie. He arrived in New York City in the winter of 1960-1961, on a mission, he said, to meet Guthrie, who was by then in a hospital in New Jersey, undergoing a slow death from Huntington’s chorea. Dylan took the bus to visit him frequently, and played songs for him. Dylan was what one Village folkie called a “neo-ethnic”: he sang songs by people like Guthrie and Leadbelly, imitating their voice and their sound. And he enhanced this folk persona by spreading make-believe accounts of his past: he told people (including reporters) that he was brought up in Gallup, New Mexico; that he had travelled through South Dakota, Kansas, Texas, Mexico, and other places, some of which he had never set foot in; that he had run away from home many times; that he had worked on and off for six years in a carnival. It wasn’t until Newsweek ran a nasty story on him, in 1963, that the truth began to come out—that he was a bar-mitzvah boy named Robert Zimmerman from a middle-class family in Hibbing, Minnesota, the birthplace of Roger Maris.

Dylan was nineteen and very raw when he began playing in Village coffeehouses. By all accounts, though, he was a fantastically quick study. He picked up songs and techniques from everyone. By the fall of 1961, he had scored a rave review in the Times and a recording contract—not with one of the small labels, like Folkways, where most downtown musicians recorded, but with Columbia, where he was signed by the legendary John Hammond, the man who “discovered” Billie Holiday. His first album, “Bob Dylan,” was released in March, 1962. It sold poorly (though it cost only about four hundred dollars to produce). People at Columbia started referring to Dylan as “Hammond’s folly.” The second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” released in May, 1963, was a different story. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” one of Dylan’s earliest original songs, was on that album. Peter, Paul, and Mary recorded it (their manager, the formidable Albert Grossman, who had created them, was also Dylan’s manager), and they released it that summer as a single. It was one of the year’s biggest hits, and Dylan became famous as a writer of protest songs: “Masters of War,” “Oxford Town,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “When the Ship Comes In,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

Protest songs were a natural outgrowth of the folk revival, in the tradition of Guthrie and Seeger’s Almanac Singers. Rock and roll was not. Dylan’s big leap, the stuff of much myth and misinformation, was the one he made in 1965, when he went electric, and released, in a fourteen-month period, three albums without peers: “Bringing It All Back Home” (March, 1965), “Highway 61 Revisited” (August), and the double album “Blonde on Blonde” (May, 1966). The myth—based on stories that audiences booed his electric sets during his British tour in the spring of 1966 and at the Newport Folk Festival the previous summer—is that Dylan betrayed the folk-music movement by switching to a more commercial rock sound. A lot of critical labor has gone into proving that Dylan was not selling out but pursuing the road of musical correctness.

The labor is misplaced, because there is no road of musical correctness. The notion that there is was created by people like Hammond, who believed that American popular music arose from the untutored self-expression of African-Americans. Hammond’s first enthusiasm was jazz, which he considered an essentially African-American musical idiom, and about which he observed, “The best of this art is usually simple, for when technique and virtuosity get in the way of real feeling the result is always dire.” Hammond thought that performers like Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway (because of their “spurious showmanship”) and Duke Ellington (because of his detachment from the troubles of what Hammond called “his race and original class”) were inauthentic. (Hammond is the subject of a genial and enjoyable new biography by Dunstan Prial, “The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music”; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27.)

Some fans did boo Dylan in 1965, but the reaction seems to have been a good deal less ideological than it was later taken to be. The problem at Newport, where the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Chambers Brothers also played with electric instruments, was largely an inadequate sound system. Dylan and his band played loud, and people couldn’t hear the words. In any event, the music he performed wasn’t new. “Like a Rolling Stone” had already come out; three weeks after Newport, it went to No. 2. In that month, August of 1965, forty-eight versions of Dylan’s songs were produced by other artists. If there was a revolution, it was pretty painless.

The most credible judgment on the change in Dylan’s music is Dave Van Ronk’s. Van Ronk was a kingpin in the Village folk scene. He was from Queens, a jazz buff who switched to folk before the folk revival was even a gleam in Albert Grossman’s eye. Though he never had a big hit, he remained traditional: he stuck with folk music and the blues. Many Village musicians resented Dylan’s success; unlike most of them, Van Ronk had a reason to. Dylan stole his arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun,” and put it on his first album, before Van Ronk had a chance to record it himself. Van Ronk dropped the song from his set because he got sick of people asking him to play Dylan’s “House of the Rising Sun.” (He noted with some satisfaction that a couple of years later, after the Animals had a hit with the song, Dylan dropped it from his set, because people kept asking him to play “that Animals song.”) But Van Ronk was a big spirit, and in his posthumously published memoir, written with Elijah Wald, “The Mayor of MacDougal Street”—a wise and very funny book; in some ways a great book—he had this to say:

I thought that going electric was a logical direction for Bobby to take. I did not care for all of his new stuff, by any means, but some of it was excellent, and it was a reasonable extension of what he had done up to that point. I knew perfectly well that none of us was a true “folk” artist. We were professional performers, and while we liked a lot of folk music, we all liked a lot of other things as well. Working musicians are very rarely purists. The purists are out in the audience kibitzing, not onstage trying to make a living. And Bobby was absolutely right to ignore them.

Nothing that Dylan did to get from Hibbing to “Blonde on Blonde” was scandalous, or even eccentric. He happened to come of musical age at a moment when rock and roll was moribund—Frankie Avalon stuff, songs for high-school sock hops. If you were serious, you played folk songs. And to become a folkie, unless you actually were from Oklahoma, you invented a persona. The whole folk revival was make-believe, anyway: it was urban kids trying to sound like hillbillies and sharecroppers. One of the folk-music veterans when Dylan came on the scene was Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a singer with a cowboy twang who had once hoboed around with Guthrie himself. Ramblin’ Jack was the stage name of one Elliot Adnopoz, a Jewish kid from Flatbush whose father was a prominent surgeon. Cambridge was another center of the folk revival—it’s where Baez got her start, in the coffeehouses around Harvard Square. (She was a B.U. dropout.) There was a bluegrass group in that scene, composed mostly of college students, who called themselves the Charles River Valley Boys. Artifice was the price of authenticity.

When Dylan left Minnesota, he had no idea that folk was the royal road to anything. If you were a folk singer in New York, you played in coffeehouses and passed around a basket for tips. No one got rich imitating Woody Guthrie. When Dylan cut his first records, though, folk was just becoming the ascendant pop musical genre. Baez’s first album, “Joan Baez,” had been a huge hit; released in November, 1960, it stayed on the Billboard charts for almost three years. Hammond didn’t sign Dylan on a whim; he signed him (as Prial strangely neglects to say, but as Hajdu makes clear in “Positively 4th Street”) because he had had a chance to sign Baez and lost her to Vanguard. His reputation for picking winners was in jeopardy; folk was hot, and he needed a folk singer.

In the early nineteen-sixties, the Weavers, Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, and Peter, Paul, and Mary were heard everywhere. (We had all their records in my house when I was growing up. I’m not sure we could have said what the Rock Island Line was , exactly, but we knew that it was a mighty good road. It was the road to ride. We also owned, and regularly consulted, the “Fireside Book of Folk Songs,” a big seller.) Guitar sales were running to a million units a year. At the height of the boom, in 1963, more than two hundred albums of folk music were released. The standard folk sound was the Seeger-Baez sound: earnest, reverent, acoustic, and completely sexless, everything Elvis was not. Dylan’s music, in this context, had a snarly, disrespectful edge that cut. (We did not listen to Dylan in my house.) Plus, a lot of his songs were funny. Pete and Joan were not about funny. Rock and roll, meanwhile, was nowhere. Elvis was making albums like “Blue Hawaii.”

Then, in February, 1964, the Beatles came to America, and rock and roll rose from the dead. The No. 1 album when the Beatles landed in New York was “The Singing Nun”—a virginal sound from an actual virgin! But, within minutes of the conclusion of the Beatles’ performance on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the acoustic sound was pop history. The first time Dylan heard the Beatles, he was in a car somewhere and they came on the radio. He almost fell out the window. He loved them, and he must have seen, alert student that he was, what he could do with the electric sound. He pushed ahead, and the Beatles stayed right in step. At the same time that Dylan was putting out his first three electric albums, between March, 1965, and May, 1966, the Beatles released “Help” (August, 1965), “Rubber Soul” (December, 1965), and “Revolver” (August, 1966). It was a good time to be alive.


Dylan wasn’t thinking about the direction of popular music in 1964, and he wasn’t thinking about the direction of the Zeitgeist, either. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he says in his remarkable autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume I” (2004), and you believe him. He was, as usual, thinking only about his sound. It is always the sound that interests Dylan about a song, and one of the reasons that he is only semi-articulate in interviews is that you can’t really describe a sound. It was Guthrie’s sound that attracted him, not Guthrie’s lyrics. When he heard Guthrie for the first time, he explains in the autobiography, “a voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’ ” It was a lonesome sound; he knew he could get it. But Dylan also liked the Kingston Trio, ex-college students from California with short hair and peppermint-striped shirts (a taste very much shared by the music lovers in my house). He liked Judy Garland singing “The Man That Got Away” and Frank Sinatra singing “Ebb Tide.” He loved “Stardust” and “Moon River.” He didn’t “come out of” any tradition. He was a magpie. The biggest inspiration for his songwriting was a Kurt Weill song, “Pirate Jenny,” from “The Threepenny Opera.” He heard it when he was waiting to meet his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who was working on a production of the play on Christopher Street. (“The Threepenny Opera” was followed by an anthology production called “Brecht on Brecht,” which may have been the inspiration for the title of “Blonde on Blonde.”)

You can’t find the road that gets you from “Hell Hound on My Trail” and “This Land Is Your Land” through “Pirate Jenny” to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” Musicians don’t follow roads. Most of them have much more eclectic musical interests than their fans do. Elijah Wald (Van Ronk’s co-author), in his indispensable revisionist history of the blues, “Escaping the Delta,” points out that Muddy Waters had more songs in his repertoire by Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, than by any blues musician; that Louis Armstrong’s favorite band was Guy Lombardo’s Royal Canadians; and that Robert Johnson played Bing Crosby songs. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity,” Chuck Berry said, “it would be Nat Cole.”

That mid-sixties sound, the sound of “Blonde on Blonde” and “Rubber Soul,” did not last. In 1978, when Dylan had just completed his second great three-album phase—“Blood on the Tracks” (1974), “Desire” (1976), and “Street Legal” (1978)—he was interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum for Playboy . Whatever else you want to say about the magazine, Playboy did give great interview, a product of stylish interviewers and brilliant editing. Rosenbaum gets off to a dicey beginning—“Besides being a singer, a poet, and now a filmmaker, you’ve also been called a visionary. Do you recall any visionary experiences while you were growing up?”—but, eventually, he gets around to the subject of Dylan’s sound: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ album,” Dylan says. “It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.”

Was that wild mercury sound in “I Want You” ?
Yeah, it was in “I Want You.” It was in a lot of that stuff. It was in the album before that, too.
“Highway 61 Revisited ”?
Yeah. Also in “Bringing It All Back Home.” That’s the sound I’ve always heard. . . .
The period when you came out with “Highway 61” must have been exciting .
Those were exciting times. We were doing it before anybody knew we would—or could. We didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be. Nobody thought of it as folk-rock at the time. There were some people involved in it like The Byrds, and I remember Sonny and Cher and the Turtles and the early Rascals. It began coming out on the radio. I mean, I had a couple of hits in a row. That was the most I ever had in a row—two. The top ten was filled with that kind of sound—the Beatles, too—and it was exciting, those days were exciting. It was the sound of the streets. It still is. I symbolically hear that sound wherever I am.
You hear the sound of the street ?
That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartment buildings and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It’s all—it’s all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know.
You mean if a jackhammer were —
Yeah, no jackhammer sounds, no airplane sounds. All pretty natural sounds. It’s water, you know water trickling down a brook. It’s light flowing through the . . .
Late-afternoon light ?
No, it’s usually the crack of dawn. Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn.
The “jingle jangle morning ”?
Right.

There’s not much to add to that.


Van Ronk thought that Dylan was sloppy, that he wrote his songs too fast. Even in Dylan’s best songs (I know that my life will not be worth much after these words appear in print), there are lines that are truly lame. “And the words that are used/For to get the ship confused/Will not be understood as they’re spoken” is not even lyrical, forget about the sense. “Ballad of a Thin Man” does not profit from the verse about the one-eyed midget shouting the word “ NOW .” (“And you say, ‘For what reason?’/And he says, ‘How?’/And you say, ‘What does this mean?’/And he screams back, ‘You’re a cow/Give me some milk/Or else go home.’ ” Maybe it makes some kind of sense as a proto-hip-hop rant.) Dylan’s words—he has said as much—are often placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line, which is why dutiful efforts to extract a message or a meaning are largely beside the point. If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says in one of his early interviews. “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.”

Sloppy or not, Dylan is astonishingly prolific; he has written more than five hundred songs. Most of them are lovely (or angry or joyous or wickedly sly or all of those things together). Many of them are unforgettable. (A new album, Dylan’s forty-fourth, called “Modern Times,” is being released this month. The songs are simple riffs, with laid-back arrangements, and all feature prominently Dylan’s gorgeous late-period croak. It sounds a little the way “Buena Vista Social Club” might have sounded if Cuba had been the birthplace of the blues.) The only comparable pop songbook from the era is Lennon-McCartney—and there were two of them. Dylan is also, despite the silly things people said about his voice when he started out, one of pop music’s greatest vocalists. His chief weakness is a tendency to shout, particularly in performance (and he is, let us say, an inconsistent performer); but, when he is in control of the instrument, no one’s voice, with that kind of music, is more textured or more beautiful.

Ninety per cent of musicianship is phrasing, and the easiest way to appreciate Dylan’s genius for phrasing is to listen to him, on bootlegs or on the late albums of traditional songs, perform songs that he didn’t write—“Folsom Prison Blues,” or “People Get Ready,” or “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.” He gets it all. When my children were little, we used to have a cassette around the house of songs for kids by pop stars, on which Dylan did “This Old Man” (“With a knick-knack paddywhack, give the dog a bone”). That performance had the weight of the whole world in it. I listened to it a hundred times and never got tired of it. You can refute Hegel, Yeats said, but not the Song of Sixpence.


2. The Days Before Rock and Roll
Dylan's Swing Time Waltz in the Face of the Apocalypse
Review of Bob Dylan’s new album “Modern Times,” which hit #1 on Billboard Chart
By PETER STONE BROWN

Sometime back in the era of Nashville Skyline, but long before Self Portrait I was talking with a friend of mine who was heavily into Dylan, and had just written a paper for some course at Columbia University on “Time and Space in Bob Dylan songs.” We were in a little hamlet called Shady in upstate New York, about seven minutes from Byrdcliffe, when he said, “I think Dylan reached a place where his dreams and reality are all one.”

Fast forward 30 years to the early spring of 2000, Bob Dylan goes on tour with Western Swing band, Asleep at the Wheel as his opening act. In Reno he says they’re the best band he ever toured with. Six months later in Indiana, Dylan does a Sons of the Pioneers song with pre-swing overtones, “Blue Bonnet Girl.” The lead singer of the original recording was one Roy Rogers. When I was a kid, I once had a set of cowboy tunes on little 45-size 78s by Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers. It came in a little box with a handle. I wonder if “Blue Bonnet Girl” was on it. A few months after that I’m sitting in a delicatessen in New York with Asleep at theWheel’s leader and founder, Ray Benson, who I’ve known longer than I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan and ask him about that tour. “He only listens to old music,” he tells me.

At the same time I’m engaged in heavy duty email correspondence with another friend. “He’s moving back to becoming the guy who made the first album,” he writes me.

In the fall Dylan suddenly recasts “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven” as a jazz song and not long after does one of the songs I never expected to ever hear, “If Dogs Run Free,” his first excursion into jazz. Before the year is out he records of all things, a Dean Martin song, “Return To Me,” for the TV series, The Sopranos.

Throughout his career Bob Dylan has dropped clues about what he’s going to do next among other things. Sometimes he takes his time about it. No better proof of this is the Bucky Baxter quote about we’d rehearse a song and then we wouldn’t play it until a year and half later.

When “Love and Theft” was released one of the things that got lost in the rubble of that day was that in a sense it was his most musically realized album. There were several genres represented including a prototypical Bob Dylan song and Dylan’s band at the time – possibly the best band he had during the Never Ending Tour – nailed them all. After years of putting down all his previous albums and producers, on “Love and Theft” you had the feeling that Dylan actually cared about the electric guitar sound. When I first heard that album one of the first things I felt was it was the most quotable Dylan album in years, and perhaps his most autobiographical.

The following year when he started playing piano again, my own feeling was he’s going back to being the guy in the band in high school.

Of course the world has changed dramatically since then. I still wonder if 9/11 hadn’t happened if Dylan would have done a dramatically different show that fall, where he went out and played the album, the way he did with Slow Train Coming and Saved. But instead, proving that he meant what he said when he said, “The songs are my lexicon,” he reached back to Hank Williams with “Wait For The Light To Shine” to open most of the shows.

In 2005 Dylan went on tour with Merle Haggard and his band The Strangers opening. To some it was an odd choice but to those who knew Haggard’s music it wasn’t. Haggard, like Dylan had explored all kinds of music, doing tribute albums to Jimmie Rodgers and Western Swing legend, Bob Wills, exploring New Orleans music and various theme albums. He led one of the tightest bands in country music, capable of playing any style. Haggard is also one of the best songwriters in country music and unfortunately best known for the anti-hippie, “Okie From Muskogee,” which early on gave him the reputation as a hard-core right winger. The humorous thing about all this was by the time he toured with Dylan, he was an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and of the Bush administration.

On that tour, Dylan’s band changed dramatically. Longtime guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell departed and at first Dylan replaced him with three people including violinist Elana Fremerman, who had opened for the Dylan/Nelson tour the previous summer. I wondered if Dylan was nervous about Haggard’s band and felt he had to bolster his own, with a twin fiddle attack to match Haggard’s (Haggard plays fiddle in addition to guitar).

Elana didn’t last out the tour and the sound of Dylan’s band to the dismay of some of his fans began to change dramatically. This year Dylan recorded a new album and then hit the road immediately. The sound of the band was quieter with a greater use of dynamics than any Dylan band on the so-called Never Ending Tour, if not any Dylan band period. At the initial shows Dylan showed a renewed commitment to his singing.

When the cover of Modern Times appeared, a friend emailed me and said, “Only he would call an album Modern Times and put a 50-year-old car on the cover.

Modern Times is a real Bob Dylan album in every sense of the word. Like its predecessor it borrows heavily from all manner of sources from ancient poets to ancient blues singers. It is dense, and dark and deep and it takes its time in an instant access world where people wear telephones and concentration is bombarded by a constant stream of so-called information, where listening to music is now a private, not a shared experience. A world where the distractions, such as the news ticker at the bottom of every news channel are as imminent a threat as any terrorist, serving only to confuse the latest war report with the latest murder horror, athletic outrage or minor kidnapping, so it’s easy to miss or maybe avoid the latest governmental or corporate menace but it’s okay, put a warming oven in your bathroom to keep your towels hot after your supersonic shower and some smiling bimbo will tell you it’s okay and the world is just a ducky place and the omnipresent horrors are just another digital image. No wonder Dylan chose the image of some blurry film noir Chrysler vehicle careening through the tilted Manhattan streets for the cover.

So into this constantly blinking, beeping, always noisy, interactive delusion, comes Bob Dylan, wizened prophet of long ago, part country preacher, part gambler, part old time traveling medicine show hawker con man, talking in some long ago far away language so that when some almost modern phrase such as recycling appears its jarring.

Against a backdrop of lurking horror, constant confrontation, constant violence, constant almost offhand murder, constant deceptions, deviations, detours and interruptions, some natural, most man-made, some kind of way deep romance (“Without you there’s no meaning in anything I do”) is going on, some kind of glimmer of happiness yearning to shine bright in the face of every conceivable obstacle.

Nothing is linear in this modern world. It’s all mixed up and swimming around, much like the toy eight ball I had as a kid, where a different message would surface each time you picked it up. Just about every topic Dylan’s ever delved into, which is everything is represented. Some are hinted at, some lurk beneath the surface, some clearly felt and just as clearly expressed and some are fully realized. Some lines you notice right away and haunt you every time and some you notice later and you wonder why you missed them the first time.

Someone once wrote about the Basement Tapes, it was “music remembered.” Modern Times in every way is music remembered. Dylan can’t help but quote from the old songs. They’re ingrained, a part of him from the simplest folk song to what he heard on the radio while growing up, the words, the melodies, the sounds, the styles, and for those who choose to moan about this, most of the answers are contained in the first song, with this not so subtle reminder: “I did all I could, I did it right there and then.”

The music for the most part is subtle. It’s not about hot guitar solos, it’s about textures, it’s about the blend of sound and though it leaps backwards from the opening Chuck Berry rocker to 40s and 50s pop and swing to blues and back with touches of country, it has a cohesive sound and feel. There are few notes if any that are out of place and the guitar solos aren’t necessarily meant to sting, they’re meant to play a part.

Dylan has already said (like he did with John Wesley Harding), “I’m not in the songs,” which most likely is partially true. The “I” in “Thunder On The Mountain” isn’t necessarily him, or could be him some of the time, just like in “Tangled Up In Blue,” it could be a different woman in every verse. Everything that is to happen on the album is laid out on this song musically and lyrically. It’s easy to pass it off as a Chuck Berry rewrite, though the acoustic guitar moves it from St. Louis (or was it Chicago) to Memphis, not to mention Dyess, Arkansas or Tupelo, Mississippi. Dylan learned long ago not to make the foolish move of tying himself down to any specific reference, but there’s little doubt who and what he’s talking about when he scolds, “Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes.”

The infatuation on “Spirit On The Water,” has never been more clear and recalls every post-sixties romantic song Dylan wrote all at once (“Your sweet voice calls out from some old familiar shrine”), except he’s always leaving and she’s apparently cheating when he’s not around, and then of course the punch line slipped in near the end, about not being able to go back to paradise because he killed a man back there, left vague and mysterious on purpose.

The sleeplessness of this track is continued to the next a rewrite of the Muddy Waters version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin.’ ” Dylan in an obvious ballsy move makes it very obvious what he’s doing and that he doesn’t care. He’s not doing anything that just about every blues singer did, as they all had no bones about saying they wrote songs that were obviously passed down the line and this extends to A.P. Carter and W.W. Guthrie as well. Once you get deep into the song, the tone changes, and the line, “I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs” acknowledges the song within the song. These complaints barely surfaced when Dylan used “Good Mornin’ Little Schoolgirl” to conjure up “Obviously Five Believers.” Perhaps more to the point an experience remembered from the era between John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. I’m in a huge apartment on the edge of Harlem where music from several rooms is emanating all the time, and we had just finished listening to Muddy Waters, when a friend says, “Yes that is great, but these are my blues, and puts Highway 61 Revisited on the turntable.

“When The Deal Goes Down” is the companion to “Spirit on the Water,” and makes Dylan’s feelings even clearer. One of the most tender vocals he ever recorded and one of the most careful, there’s a sadness behind everything that is inescapable. It’s in his voice and again he seems to comment on what he’s singing, in the lines, “I heard a deafening noise, I felt transient joys/”I know they’re not what they seem.”

Dylan has always used blues songs as kind of a breather in his album, especially for shifting the change of focus, and the rewrite of “Someday Baby,” (another nod to Muddy Waters) serves just that purpose, and is also a chance for Donnie Herron to show what he can do on slide guitar and fiddle, making it clear they’re both slide instruments. It also serves to set up as well as off, the next song and a thematic shift in the album’s lyrical direction.

“Workingman’s Blues #2” has one of the most exquisite introductions to any song Dylan has ever recorded. With Dylan’s piano and Donnie Herron’s viola, it is simply gorgeous. It is also a nod to Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” in the title, and the electric guitar somewhere in the mix at the end of each chorus, but this song is anything but the blues though the person in the song more than has them. Like “Mississippi” on “Love and Theft,” it serves as the song that sounds like a Bob Dylan song. The irony of this song is the person in the song isn’t working and nothing for him is working, but what Dylan does is get deep into heart, soul and thoughts of the unemployed, how it feels to be totally beaten down by innumerable forces beyond your control. And for those who would blithely dismiss this songs as nonsense, I know more people who lost their jobs and couldn’t get another one during the first part of this decade/century than at any other time in my life, and most of these people were forced to take jobs paying far less than what they were making and should be making and far below their capabilities. Welcome to the real USA.

“Beyond The Horizon” serves to give the listener another break, with a Twilight Zone rewrite of “Red Sails In The Sunset,” but not really. The paradise setting is deceptive, as it is dark and dreary, is ringed with flame and fire, treacherous seas, lives that have been spared and people praying for souls.

“Nettie Moore,” perhaps the high point of the album is one of the most astounding tracks Dylan has recorded in the past two decades. With a singularly insistent, waiting, pacing heartbeat drumbeat, the songs moves through centuries and subjects, back and forth through time, through romance, through dreams, in a world gone black, where praying in the light, the singer wishes for darkness. At the same time the mystical rambling joker of “Love and Theft” briefly appears, but as with much of the rest of this album, the only force that diminishes grief is love.

The grief starts swinging in the face of disaster on “When The Levee Breaks,” with a repeating guitar riff that is ominous and deliberate. Like “Thunder On The Mountain,” it’s easy at first to brush off as another blues song, and again the lyrics wander from romance to impending doom, but as each verse progresses, the lyrics get darker, sometimes in the whole verse, sometimes in the answer line. One of the few songs with guitar solos, the guitars are hot, but the sound is muted so they’re just another part of the song.

The country gospel hymn, “Wayfaring Stranger,” done by all kinds of singers from Burl Ives to Bill Monroe to Johnny Cash, as well as the basis for one of John Lee Hooker’s scariest tunes, “Don’t Turn Me From Your Door,” which in turn was the inspiration for Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks,” sets the tone and the canvas for “Ain’t Talkin’,” a major work. Quoting “Wild Mountain Thyme,” Dylan (or is it a character) wanders into the mystic garden, where he is immediately attacked and finds out the mystic garden isn’t a garden at all. The character in the song, using an endless list of ancient songs catalogs a list of unspeakable horrors, but keeps walking, keeps on anyway, until perhaps back at the beginning of the song, he asks a woman (who doesn’t answer) where the gardener’s gone, and realizes he is at the end of the world.

Using music rather words to speak, as the song ends, the same way it started, it suddenly resolves on a celestial major chord perhaps signaling the shimmering and shining light behind the horizon.

(Peter Stone Brown is a musician, songwriter, and writer. He can be reached through his website or at: psb51@verizon.net)