At the beginning of the 1970s,
Dylan’s star seemed to be fading fast. Self Portrait,
an often charmingly off-the-wall collection of folk and pop covers and
Dylan’s own scraps, may or may not, as Dylan later claimed, have
been contrived to puncture the myth of his invincibility, but it certainly
had that effect. New Morning, with its bracing restlessness,
restored some of his lost luster, but as a songwriter Dylan still seemed
more than a little lost, grasping every which way at straws of inspiration
and purpose. Then, after four years of virtual silence, Planet Waves
(1974) broke genuinely new ground. Dylan’s voice had changed,
not so much in the way it sounded as in the way it registered. There
was a quaking in it, almost impalpable yet omnipresent, something rooted
in the way the lyrics, in their diction and in their movement, seemed
always to be reaching beyond their own capacity to sustain, as if recklessly
crossing boundaries, or even flouting taboo.
Then in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks arrived. I put the
needle down on the first track, and suddenly, the way it always does
when summoned by great art, the whole world seemed to align itself with
the moment of listening:
Early
one mornin’ the sun was shinin’,
I was layin’
in bed
Wond’rin’
if she’d changed at all
If her hair
was still red.
Her folks
they said our lives together
Sure was
gonna be rough
They never
did like Mama’s homemade dress
Papa’s
bankbook wasn’t big enough.
And I was
standin’ on the side of the road
Rain fallin’
on my shoes
Heading
out for the old East Coast
Lord knows
I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through,
Tangled
up in blue.
Here was the same quaking I heard in the lyrics of Planet Waves,
except now it was a delicate shudder, and now, most astonishingly, Dylan’s
voice was fully equal to it. Indeed, it was hard to believe, even as
I was listening to them, that their could be any words to sustain the
shuddering rush of that voice.
But there are, and we are listening to them. The first thing I noticed
is that just as Dylan’s voice sounded different than any voice
of his I had heard before, so did these words sound different than the
words in earlier Dylan songs. These words are carried forward on a wave
of sound and sense that is at once more articulate - more minutely articulated
- and somehow more present, or more alive, than ever before.
Expecting All the Gifts That Wise Men Bring
My last Never Ending Tour concert was nearly two years ago - Kilkenny
15.07.01. I didn’t enjoy it all that much. I was there with some
family and friends, of whom some had never seen Bob before and some
hadn’t seen him for years. They all thought it was great. On the
way out of the concert I was complaining to one of my friends (who had
last seen Bob on the ’86 tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)
about the song selection – the most recent song he played was
‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’. Apart from that song
everything was from the sixties - ‘a greatest hits collection’
I said with disdain. This was unusual - normally Bob played a much greater
cross-section of material. I was annoyed. My friend wondered what I
was complaining about. Bob was singing really well, the songs were great
songs, the band was great - what was my problem?
Later another friend remarked on how she really loved the version he
did of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’. Now, if you’re familiar
only with the version of that song that Bob recorded in 1964, the version
that’s on Greatest Hits, then I can imagine that you might well
be in Kilkenny that night and be amazed at the rearrangement of the
song - it really is true what they say, Dylan never does a song the
same way twice! On the other hand if you’ve heard lots and lots
of live versions of that song over decades of performance, and loved
many of them, and you know that this NET arrangement of the song reached
its peak years ago, then on that night in July 2001 you would probably
sigh at this performance - I did. I thought it was on the mediocre side,
routine at best.
That night in Kilkenny listening to my friends talking about the gig
it hit me with some force (and not for the first time) that Bob really
was not playing these NET concerts for the likes of me. He was playing
it for them, the casual fans, and I wouldn’t blame him. Not an
original thought - I know. But it made me sigh to myself. Driving home
later ‘I Want You’ came on the radio. Then the DJ came on:
‘well it never was about the singing, really, was it?’ she
said, smugly. ‘Oh God’ I said, turning off the radio. I
sighed again. That’s a lot of sighing for one night. Does the
NET make you sigh a lot too?
So much of the NET is ordinary. And some of it is truly wonderful. But
it takes so much time to keep up with it. (It remains an ambition of
mine to get every show on CD. To listen to them all? Wouldn’t
that be mad? Wouldn’t it? That’s more than 3000 CDs!) And
is it really worth keeping up with it? You ask yourself that question,
although you know there’s no point because you’re going
to keep on collecting the discs.
Christopher Ricks’ Dylan’s Visions
of Sin Penguin Books, 25 September 2003
For years there was
very little critical writing on Bob Dylan’s work, and when you
found some, you seized upon it gratefully and with relish - if you
could see the point of criticism at all.
Things have changed. Now there is a huge amount of it, and some of
it well worth reading, even if I no longer seize upon it so much as
advance toward it as into a hole that may contain fresh water or may
be a pit of snakes. Where there is criticism there is often much hissing
and venom. Worse, poor critical writing is plentiful and can strangle
up your mind.
I still feel gratitude for the good stuff, and this magazine seems
to be shaping up as one of the places you might expect to find it.
Issue 6 ran a fine piece by young Alan Davis (I assume he’s
young, and mention it, because his main fault is being a bit wide-eyed:
easily forgiven in the young, even as it discomforts the rest of us
by rebuke); and there was a scarily good reworked lecture by John
Gibbens - a piece so alert and sensitive to the nuance and detail
of poetic effect that I almost wanted to give up using words myself,
on the page or the public platform.
And now - at long last, it must be said, and after almost as many
delays as Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home - the
real heavyweight lit.crit. professor steps into the ring, 69-year-old
Christopher Ricks (yes, another British critic on this American artist),
with Dylan’s Visions of Sin.
The surprise is that this is Ricks’ fattest critical work. I’d
expected a slimmer volume than he has accorded Tennyson, Milton, or
T.S.Eliot. His first book was Milton’s Grand Style,
1963; among others there has also been Keats and Embarrassment,
1974; T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, 1988; Tennyson,
1989; and more recently Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917,
described by the New Yorker as ‘the best book ever written on
T.S. Eliot’. What does it tell us that Ricks devotes more pages
to Bob Dylan than any of the rest?
If your hunch is that it means he has finally come out and writ large
his conviction that Dylan is up there, you’re right - though
it’s one of the many attractions of the book that he rarely
makes those value-judgments we’re so easily tempted into, most
of us, as to how great an artist A is, or how much better than B.
So there’s no ‘Dylan is better than Browning’; there’s
only the playful reference to Shakespeare as Dylanesque.
Before elaborating on the book’s other attractions, I have to
say that its amplitude is not entirely a blessing. Ricks indulges
as never before in his remorseless, grinding wordplay, and his eminence
precludes anyone else having taken to it the editorial red pencil
he might have been expected to use himself.
