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Wednesday, January 27
BOB DYLAN'S MICRO FICTION
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Jan 2010 12:55 AM PST
In his brilliant and eccentrically revealing memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan talks about a crucial inspiration in his development as a songwriter -- the first time he heard "Pirate Jenny", from Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. The lyric is written in the voice of an oppressed young girl, who recounts her fantasy of a pirate ship which will appear in the harbor of her city and bombard it in her name, destroying all her enemies and rescuing her from a life of servitude.
It is thus a surreal fiction set within the slightly less surreal fiction of the opera itself, both modes operating here within a single song. Dylan says this expanded his notion of what a song could be. He was of course already familiar with the narrative conventions of folk songs, especially the murder ballads, and he would follow these conventions in many of his own works, telling self-contained fictional or historical tales, usually with a strong social message, but "Pirate Jenny" set him off on another strategy, involving fantastical tales within tales.
In "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", from Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan tells a tale in the voice of a crew member of the Mayflower, which is somehow commanded by Melville's Captain Ahab and lands in America for a series of comic anachronistic adventures. (Among the artifacts surrounding Dylan in the photograph on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home is the Lotte Lenya album on which he first heard "Pirate Jenny".)
"Desolation Row", from Highway 61 Revisited, offers a similar bit of jumbled-up, surreal narrative but has become less buffoonish, more poetic.
"Desolation Row" conjures up a vision of a very specific place inhabited by an improbable cast of characters, drawn from every aspect of culture. The real-life poets Pound and Eliot have a mythical fistfight, The Phantom Of the Opera shares the scene with Ophelia and Cassanova. It's a vision, on one level, of culture as it's actually experienced in the imagination. Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton and Victor Hugo are forever linked by The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- Desolation Row is that precinct of the mind where all four of them meet up and hang out together.
On the same album, in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", Dylan presents a variation on this fractured narrative strategy, this time with a series of vignettes and anecdotes about some beat characters hanging out in Mexico. Each element of the song seems to open onto a whole narrative episode which, however, is only suggested, not recounted. It's like shards of a Kerouac novel discovered at an archaeological dig and displayed in glass cases, inviting the viewer to reconstruct the whole from them. (This is, of course, just an extension, or extreme compression, of the fragmented narrative style of Kerouac himself.)
Many Dylan songs can be seen as collages of poetic images, but most are more acutely perceived as collages of story fragments, micro fictions, which suggest great narrative vistas seen fleetingly through a narrow window whose shutters open and close quickly. His song "Floater", from Love and Theft, suggests a whole cycle of Faulknerian novels glimpsed in this way. Ironically, many lines in "Floater" were lifted almost straight from a Japanese as-told-to autobiography called Confessions Of A Yakuza, yet Dylan has used them in the context of a series of interconnected micro fictions about a place and time and characters that seem indigenously, essentially American.
Here are eight lines from "Floater":
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes
I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves
I doubt if any of this reflects actual memories from Dylan's own life, but the lines do seem to sum up the whole life of some particular person, in a kind of generational saga told through lightning flashes of imagery.
The precise details, the dragnets and ropes, the old cloth, the ring dancing, seduce us into emblematic episodes, in somewhat the same way that the brief flashbacks in A Christmas Carol seduce us into emblematic episodes from the happier early years of Scrooge. And Dylan doesn't just leave his hopes and dreams behind, he leaves them "buried under tobacco leaves". Here the detail is more symbolic, more open -- did the narrator lose his hopes and dreams in the drudgery of work, or just in wasted hours marked out by the smoke of cigarettes?
The details and episodes evoked in these lines propel the story Dylan is telling into our own imaginations, prompting us to fill in the rest, to travel back in time like Scrooge, to visit the narrator's lost world, to construct our own sense of it, our own dream of it. And this, of course, is what all good stories do. What's left out of them is what eventually belongs most securely to us, almost as if they were our own experiences, because we have collaborated in the making of them.
This was one of the secrets of storytelling that Hemingway knew well, and consciously, almost from the very beginning of his career as a writer. All of his best work uses this "strategic opacity", as Stephen Greenblatt has called it, referring to Shakespeare's method of storytelling -- this uncharted space that the hearer of the tale must fill in for herself.
Dylan is a great singer, a fine tunesmith and poet, but not least among his gifts is the gift of storytelling, in a fragmented, micro-fictional form of his own devising.
Friday, January 15
THE REAL DEAL
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:15 AM PST
After yesterday's jeremiad about the Pat Robertson brand of Christianity, it was good to be reminded by my friend Paul Zahl of what Charles Dickens found when he looked over the shoulder of one of his characters as she gazed into "the eternal book":
Harriet complied and read -- read the eternal book for all the weary,
and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of
this earth -- read the blessed history, in which the blind, lame,
palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned
of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride,
indifference, or sophistry through all the ages that this world shall
last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce . . .
-- from Dombey and Son
That quote in turn made me think of these lines from Bob Dylan's "Chimes Of Freedom", whose rhythm and language are so oddly like those of Dickens, with a Beat twist to them:
Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing . . .
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Dylan may have had the eternal book in mind when he wrote this, with that "cathedral night" and that climactic image of the "hung-up person", a bit of Beat lingo which, in this context, puts one in mind of some later lines he wrote:
There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door,
You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the war
After losin' every battle.
Wednesday, January 6
EPIPHANY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 06 Jan 2010 12:08 AM PST
Another epiphany rocks the word, another Christmas season ends. Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart reminds us that all is not lost in the art of our time. This year, let's all stand up and change everything, retake our culture from the vile corporations and the sick, demented people who run them.
What good are you anyway if you can't stand up to some old businessman?
-- Bob Dylan
[Image by Gentile da Fabriano, just a toiler in the trenches of Renaissance art.]
Wednesday, December 23
O' LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Dec 2009 08:07 AM PST
Have
you ever wondered what Bethlehem looked like at the time Jesus was born
there? It wasn't something Pieter Bruegel the Elder wondered about --
he knew it looked just like any small town in the Netherlands, where he
lived, and that winter there was pretty much the same as the winters he grew up with.
So in 1566 he painted The Census At Bethlehem,
above, from life, as it were, simply inserting Mary and Joseph and
their donkey into the scene. As you can see, the inn looks pretty
crowded -- have Mary and Joseph waited too late to arrange for
accommodation? Mary is about to give birth -- suppose Joseph can't
find her a room?
Well, thereby hangs a tale . . .
Dylan closes his very strange Christmas album with this song about Bethlehem, and closes the song itself with a quiet, heartfelt "Amen". Bethlehem is no stranger to Dylan than it was to Pieter Bruegel -- he sings about it as though it's as real and familiar as that little whistle-stop up the road, where the only motel in town is tiny and the diner closes at nine.
Why does Dylan feel so at home there, just as much at home as Pieter Breugel once did? It's a mystery which the art itself has no obligation to resolve.
Much has been made of this exchange from an interview Dylan gave to Bill Flannagan of the Street Newspaper:
BF: You really give a heroic performance of "O’ Little Town Of Bethlehem". The way you do it reminds me a little of an Irish rebel song. There’s
something almost defiant in the way you sing, “The hopes and fears of
all the years are met in thee tonight.” I don’t want to put you on the
spot, but you sure deliver that song like a true believer.
BD: Well, I am a true believer.
Dylan watchers will know enough to catch the ambiguity of the response. "A true believer in what?" we might ask. As far as I'm concerned, Dylan's personal religious beliefs are entirely irrelevant to Christmas In the Heart. Nothing he might say or not say about them can change a note of what's on the record, and nothing on the record can constitute reliable evidence about what he "really believes" -- anymore than Jan Van Eyck's Altarpiece of Ghent can tell us anything definitive about Jan's personal religious beliefs.
What we can say is that Dylan sings "O' Little Town Of Bethlehem" in the voice of a true believer, that the performance is incredibly moving, whether considered as a work of art or as a witness of faith. The way he hits the word "dear" in the phrase "the dear Christ enters in", the solemn humility and peacefulness of that final "Amen" . . . these are things to marvel at, things that touch the heart.
As with Van Eyck's altarpiece, Dylan has brought a lifetime of craft to this work, an extraordinary commitment of feeling and care, without a trace of cowardly, modernist irony. It is deeply "religious" art, in subject and execution, art that transcends the personality of the artist . . . the sort of art we don't see much of these days, and a wonderful reminder of what we've been missing.
Art like this doesn't ask (much less answer) the question "What does the artist really believe?" It asks the question "What do you really believe?"
The sarcastic scorn being heaped upon Christmas In the Heart in some quarters, with knowing, cowardly, modernist irony, tells us all we need to know about the sorry state of our culture in this troubled holiday season of 2009. Dylan's album tells us that things could be different, should be different.
Can I get an "Amen"?
Tuesday, December 22
THE CHRISTMAS SONG — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 Dec 2009 09:05 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
Dylan just eases into this one, with a quiet pleasure that summons up an image of him settling back in an armchair before the fire, wearing his Bing Crosby cardigan and filling up a pipe -- with tobacco! The ghost of his favorite dog from childhood, old Shep, is curled up at his feet, he can smell the turkey roasting in the oven and he knows that the egg nog in the icebox is just about ripened. Boy, that's gonna be good.
The night wind is whipping snow against the windowpanes, and Bob is entertaining visitors, even though nobody but him can see them.
He's communing here, with Bing and Nat and Frank, not trying to outdo them, just happy to be in their company.
In short, he's messing with your head. He's messing with his own head. But what the heck? Just throw another log on the fire, settle back in your own armchair and enjoy it. It's Christmas . . . the happiest season of all.
Monday, December 21
CHRISTMAS ISLAND — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Mon 21 Dec 2009 08:27 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
How'd you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island? Dylan and his devilishly cute-sounding girl back-up singers make it seem like a swell idea.
In an interview about the album, Dylan said he knew nothing about Christmas Island -- not even if it was a real place. It is -- that's a picture of it above. It's the largest coral island in the world, sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was discovered in 1777 by Captain Cook -- on Christmas Eve, natch. It was unpopulated then but now has a few thousand inhabitants and, due to its position relative to an international date line, is the first inhabited place on the globe to ring in the New Year.
The British conducted some of their first nuclear bomb tests there in the late Fifties and early Sixties -- radio reports of which may have entered Dylan's subconscious at the time. Graham Greene mentioned the tests in his novel Our Man In Havana, clearly struck by the irony of such things happening on an island so named.
The song was first recorded by the Andrews Sisters (above) in 1946, reflecting America's fascination with the Pacific islands in the post-WWII era. After the horrors which unfolded on them in that war, they took on a paradoxical aura of magic, making Hawaiian shirts, exotic tropical drinks and "Tiki" music irresistible. Were they the symbol of an innocent paradise lost in the war, which we wanted to recover? Or did we simply feel a new, proprietary affection for the places where so much American blood was spilled?
All the contradictions were embodied in works like South Pacific, the stage and film musical, and in John Ford's Donovan's Reef (where a South Seas Christmas celebration figured prominently in the tale.) Both these works explored the subject of racism, in a setting where the issue was perhaps easier to engage, metaphorically, than on home soil. (Thanks to Paul Zahl for noting the Donovan's Reef connection.)
Musically, the Tiki style, with its pedal-steel guitar, influenced country-western music (and, as Mary Zahl has reminded me, Dylan's own Tiki-inflected pastiche, "Beyond the Horizon"). Bing Crosby and Jimmy Buffett, both of whom Dylan admires, recorded covers of "Christmas Island".
So a lot of cultural lines intersect in this song, as they do in all the songs on Christmas In the Heart, but the best thing about Dylan's version is that he plays it straight, without "quotes" around the number -- it's not about nostalgia or irony or attitude. It gets to the heart of what made the Tiki style so appealing -- a dreamy, lyrical vision of places where love and life are easy, simple, natural . . . places where goodness calmly gets the better of meanness . . . places where all your Christmas dreams come true.
Sunday, December 20
THE FIRST NOËL — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Sun 20 Dec 2009 07:01 AM PST
[Image © 2007 Midolluin]
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
As I wrote recently to a friend, Dylan has a capacity to re-imagine Christmas as though the past 2000 years of institutional church nonsense never happened. He seems to be singing from the apostolic era of Christianity, as an eyewitness to what went down back then.
On this song, I have no trouble hearing the voice of one of the original shepherds in Bethlehem who first saw the momentous star and followed it to a stable, where a baby was being born. The shepherd was a boy then -- now he's an old man, but he's telling the story one more time, just as he remembers it. "And by the light of that same star," Dylan sings, in a tone that suggests he's saying, ". . . that star, boys, the one I was telling you about, the one I saw."
And as he's telling it, he gets caught up in the excitement of it . . . one more time -- not just reporting anymore, by the end of the account, but adding his voice to the angels' chorus, quite carried away by the word they kept repeating . . . "Noël!"
He's probably dined out on the story more times than he cares to remember, to the point where the old-timers of Bethlehem are sick of it, but it still gets to him, in spite of himself. It makes him feel like a kid again.
Saturday, December 19
SILVER BELLS — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Sat 19 Dec 2009 12:09 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
Dylan's version of "Silver Bells" has a country-tinged arrangement, which subtly suggests that the singer is far from home this holiday season, looking around in wonder at the city celebrations, "Santa's big scene". Dylan delivers the lyrics with a quiet sort of reverence, though -- as he listens for the transcendent meaning of it all, which he hears in the silver bells ringing out from the steeples of churches, high above the bustle, echoed perhaps in the hand-bells of the sidewalk Santas.
You're bound to think of the vision delivered in Dylan's own song "Ring Them Bells", in which sacred bells toll out their timeless commentary on "the wheel and the plow".
In the middle of the urban hurly-burly, Dylan is looking for something that isn't immediately apparent, something that speaks only to the heart.
Friday, December 18
MUST BE SANTA — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Fri 18 Dec 2009 12:01 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
The raucous arrangement here is led by David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, on accordion. His Tex-Mex style comes full circle, back to the polkas played in south-Texas German communities which morphed into the Latin-inflected border music of today.
It's all part of the delirious free-fall through American music that Dylan takes on Christmas In the Heart, into a place where there are no borders between styles, genres, periods. No borders, either, between high-brow and low-brow taste, deeply religious and secularized Christmas music, fun and faith. In short, this is a journey into culture as it's actually experienced, a jumble of modes and moods and images that somehow adds up to Christmas in America. Dylan is down on his knees at one moment, up on his feet dancing at another. This is not chaos -- it's life.
He's dancing on this song, proving that joy to the world doesn't have to be delivered on an organ in a church, or in a choirboy's voice. Further commentary would be useless -- you need to get up off the couch and dance to this one.
As the wacky video of the song suggests, it's one way of shooing the Devil and all his works out the window.
Wednesday, December 16
HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Wed 16 Dec 2009 12:02 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
Finally Dylan comes up against a song with a precedent he can't really improve upon or add much to. Judy Garland's recording of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas", done for the soundtrack of Meet Me In St. Louis, is the definitive version of the song, treading the line between the lyric's sadness and its hopefulness with sublime delicacy.
It's only her soundtrack version that rules, though -- the recording she made for the song's commercial release on Decca is very fine but not quite as moving. This was true of many of her movie songs, which she really "acted" on the MGM recording stage, then performed in a more neutral style for Decca.
Dylan's version is very fine, too. He sings it tenderly -- but somehow he misses the melancholy, half-panicked undertow of Garland's soundtrack recording. Only on the line "until then we'll have to muddle through somehow" does he suggest that things might be worse than he's letting on elsewhere in the song.
[Image © 2009 Drew Friedman]
Sinatra, on his similarly fine recording, also misses the full measure of melancholy that Garland conveys -- though like Dylan he has his moments. When he sings "so have yourself a merry little Christmas now" you can feel a sense of doubt and resignation that gets to the song's core.
Garland is aided greatly on the soundtrack recording by Conrad Salinger's subtle but deeply expressive arrangement, which brilliantly evokes the melancholy mode without hitting you over the head with it. This allows Garland her own subtlety in interpreting the song -- you feel its sadness without quite being conscious of it, at least on a first hearing. On subsequent hearings you realize that Garland's character in the film is not just trying to reassure her younger sister with the sweet song, she's trying to reassure herself -- and not quite succeeding.
Garland's is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time -- to say that Sinatra and Dylan almost give her a run for her money is high enough praise for any singer.
Monday, December 14
O' COME ALL YE FAITHFUL (ADESTE FIDELES) — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Mon 14 Dec 2009 09:22 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
Now we come to another of the classic carols on the album, which, as I've written before, "have a different kind of joy than the upbeat pop numbers --
almost triumphal. Dylan sings the first verse of 'Adeste Fideles' in
Latin, punching out the words like a preacher on fire with the
unimpeachable authority of the good news he's delivering. Now that
Pavarotti has moved on, is there anybody left but Bob who can sing
Latin like he means it?"
Pavarotti, by the way, does a stunning version of this song on his great Christmas album O Holy Night. There, Pavarotti summons the world to worship, in tones meant to ring out from one end of the globe to the other. Dylan, by contrast, seems to be addressing a small band of stragglers at the back of beyond. He sings the name of Christ as though you might not have heard it before, stretching it out into two syllables (verging on three.) He doesn't sing "O come let us adore him" as it's ever been sung before -- the "O" is more of a cross between "Aww" and "Ahh", as though his own heart were being pierced by the exhortation.
The stragglers are not alone, however -- Dylan's back-up girl group chimes in sweetly at the end, addressing "all ye citizens of Heaven above" . . . the seraphim and cherubim who are accompanying the rag-tag pilgrims on their impromptu journey to a little stable somewhere.
Dylan's version of "Adeste Fideles" is the greatest version of this song that ever has been, and probably ever will be, done.
Saturday, December 12
THE CHRISTMAS BLUES — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Sat 12 Dec 2009 05:34 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
This song is a bit of a mind-bender. It's an ersatz, easy-listening, Tin Pan Alley blues -- Dean Martin sang the classic version. Dylan sings it with a combination of Dino's nonchalance and the rough vocal directness of a real bluesman.
It's like hearing Charlie Patton sing "Blues In the Night" in a Las Vegas lounge backed by the Count Basie Orchestra of the Fifties.
It doesn't have the strong emotional impact of some songs on the album but it's a lot of fun -- and it fills in a few tesserae of the musical mosaic that is Christmas In the Heart.
Thursday, December 10
LITTLE DRUMMER BOY — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Thu 10 Dec 2009 05:00 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
"The Little Drummer Boy" was one of my least favorite Christmas songs -- until I heard Dylan's version of it. It's so sweetly and tenderly sung. It's about a musician's gift to the Prince Of Peace, and maybe it got to Dylan on that level, resonating in a purely personal way. Time goes backwards and forwards in Dylan's version. The line "I am a poor boy, too" now harks back to Dylan's own "Po' Boy", and there's also the echo of "for Christmas buy her a drum" from "She Belongs To Me". Dylan's songs draw from every area of America's musical heritage, and on this album of covers he takes the gifts he rescued from the past back to where he found them, rescuing new gifts in the process.
There's something spooky about the whole album -- a sense that Dylan is floating through our culture on multiple levels, summoning whatever he needs to enrich the clichés of Christmas music, to reconnect us with its roots, in history and in faith.
On one level, "The Little Drummer Boy" is a shameless appeal to sentiment. But Dylan asks, "What if we took the sentiment seriously, as an honest appeal to the heart?" The answer is tears.
Tuesday, December 8
I'LL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Tue 08 Dec 2009 04:20 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
One wag reviewing this album said that Dylan's "I'll Be Home For Christmas" comes off as more of a threat than a promise. Dylan does sound a bit like like the irascible old uncle who's been invited to Christmas dinner but that everyone is hoping won't show up, because he always creeps people out.
But the performance takes on another dimension if you remember the provenance of the song. Bing Crosby recorded the hit version of it in 1943, when legions of young American men with thousand-yard stares were hunkering down in foxholes in Italy or on remote Pacific islands, or training for the invasion of Europe that everyone knew would have to be made eventually.
Many of these men knew they wouldn't be home for Christmas, except in their dreams, and might not be home for Christmas ever again. It summed up what they were thinking -- in the heart -- and broke the hearts of their loved ones back in the States.
Today, the song doesn't have this resonance -- it's just a wistful, sentimental reverie about a family gathering. Dylan brings it back to what it originally was, a matter of life and death.
Listen to it with the context of 1943 in mind, which the retro arrangement helps you to do -- listen to the weariness and edge of hopelessness in Dylan's voice . . . and it will break your heart, too.
Perhaps it will also remind you that the context of 1943 is not so different from our own right now, and so incline your thoughts to the legions of young American men and women in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan this year who won't be home for Christmas, and might not be home for Christmas . . . ever again.
Sunday, December 6
HARK THE HERALD ANGELS SING — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Sun 06 Dec 2009 03:58 AM PST
Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . .
Dylan's vocal on this classic carol starts out softly. Note the difference in the way he sings the word "king" in the first line here from the way he spits it out on "Do You Hear What I Hear", when he's speaking in the voice of a shepherd boy chastising pomp. He's talking about a different kind of king now, a king of mercy mild. But then he comes to "joyful all ye nations rise" . . . there's a little pause before "rise" and Dylan's voice soars (roughly) on the word. It becomes a command.
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