Category Archives: Music

DYLAN AND GODARD

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Jean-Luc Godard always had a strong identification with Bob Dylan, a sense that their careers, their artistic journeys and even their lives were somehow linked, even though they never worked together.  The idea is not as strange as it sounds.  Both were artists steeped in tradition, the tradition of cinema in Godard's case and the tradition of American music in Dylan's.  Both were looking for ways to bring what they loved from those traditions into the present, to give them a form that would be alive for the future.  Both were re-mixers, who made startling recombinations of old things that they then inflected with a purely contemporary resonance.

Both also had serious motorcycle accidents that resulted in periods of seclusion.



In the late 70s, each artist began to lose touch with his traditional audience — Dylan wasn't making much of a showing on the charts anymore, Godard was finding it harder and harder to get financing for his films.  They weren't cutting the same figures on the cultural stage that they had in previous years.



Godard took an interest in Dylan's fortunes, kept track of his successes and failures — since they seemed in some ways to mirror his own.  It wasn't just a question of sympathy with a fellow artist in a similar predicament — it was a question of an almost mystical identification with one of the only artists of the 20th Century operating at his level of genius and accomplishment, and thus one of the only artists of their time who could possibly understand what it felt like to be Jean-Luc Godard in commercial and cultural isolation.



Most surprisingly, Godard has reported that when Dylan “turned to Christ” in 1978, he said to himself, “That will happen to me, too.”  Then he forgot about it, until he made Hail Mary in 1984.  “Look,” he said.  “Dylan warned me.”

FLOATING AWAY

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                                                                                                [Photo © Hugh McCarten]

A year ago today Oscar Fruchtman died, way before his time.  Oscar was an extraordinary presence in the lives of everyone who knew him — brilliant, hilariously funny, haunted by demons.  He was a gifted musician and songwriter, who could write funny and also write sweet.

My friend Hugh McCarten was one of the people who knew him best, and Hugh was asked to deliver the eulogy at Oscar's memorial service, which is linked to below.  But before you read it, listen to a song Oscar wrote (with Hugh contributing some to the lyrics), “Floating Away”, which is both funny and sweet — a song about Noah, about hope and rebirth and faith:

Floating Away (© 2010 A. Fruchtman/H. McCarten)

This is a live recording from The Rose Tattoo in Key West, Florida, from March of 1979 — with Oscar and Ed “Woody” Allen on guitars, Din Allen on bass, Hugh on toy organ, Oscar singing lead and the other lads doing back-up vocals.

Here's what Hugh had to say about Oscar when it came time to bid him farewell:

Eulogy For A Luftmensch

(In the eulogy, Hugh quotes the lyrics from another song by Oscar, “Brooklyn Boy” — you can listen to Oscar perform it here.)

CELEBRATING OSCAR

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EULOGY FOR OSCAR

Oscar Fruchtman died on the morning of Saturday, March 28, 2009 in his
apartment at the Kenmore Residence on East 23rd Street in Manhattan.

This eulogy was given on Monday, March 30, 2009 at the Plaza Jewish
Community Chapel, 630 Amsterdam Ave.  Previous speakers at the service
were Rabbi Emeritus David H. Lincoln and Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, both of
the Park Avenue Synagogue.

My name is Hugh McCarten and I was Oscar’s longest serving friend.  I
was his best friend.  Rabbi Lincoln said we should always be prepared
for circumstances like this, but I wasn’t prepared when Oscar passed
away on Friday [from the audience, Janet Moss, Oscar’s mother:
“Saturday!”]  Oh, right – Saturday.  And I’m not prepared for what I’m
doing now, but as Oscar’s dad Carl used to say, “These are the knishes
that prevail.”  So we’re going to go ahead.  The topic is remembering
Oscar and I’m trying to think of the best way to do that.  Rabbi
Cosgrove suggested that perhaps Oscar, following Talmudic tradition,
was one of the “Lamed Vovniks”, 36 righteous individuals who are on the
earth at any given time and without whose divine presence the world
could not endure.  That’s possible, but I came across a word recently
that I am sure applies to Oscar and the word is “luftmensch”, literally
an “air man”, a dreamer.

And apparently Oscar was a dreamer from the beginning.  I first got to
know him and his wonderful family back in the early 1970s and he told
me that practically his first memory was of his parents' liquor store,
South Ferry Liquors.  As a young child, he said he couldn’t quite
understand what “South Ferry Liquors” meant and thus he envisioned some
kind of fantastic combination boat/store that went careening around the
New York harbor.  And so began his dreaming . . .

He told me he had been named after his grandfather, whose spirit it was
suggested he had inherited, and he told me about his grandmother Sadie,
who liked to invoke the 11th Commandment: “Don’t Get Caught!”  And about
his Uncle Louie who died in 1957 at Yankee Stadium in the middle of a
New York Giants football game and about growing up in Brooklyn on
Ovington Avenue and later on Eastern Parkway.  He told me about going to
Stuyvesant High School and becoming the International President of USY
– United Synagogue Youth.  Oscar was, as some of you know, a great
songwriter and I wish I could sing a bunch of his songs today, but we
don’t have time, so I’d like to read the lyrics of a song written in
the 1970s that sums up his youth and its title is “Brooklyn Boy”:

BROOKLYN BOY

I don’t say much but I’m a fast talker
I never look I’m a jay-walker
I guess you could say I’m a New Yawker
I’m just a Brooklyn Boy

From Flatbush to Brooklyn Heights
You better not miss those Brooklyn sights
Botanical Gardens and Prospect Park
But you better lock your door when it gets dark

I used to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers
Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, the late Gil Hodges
I used to love to watch Roy Rogers
I’m just a Brooklyn Boy

Coney Island, down by the sea
I just hop right on that BMT
Mom cooled Pepsi right in the fridge
And Daddy tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge!

I used to eat in a delicatessen
Turkey on club with Russian dressing
Then I would take my piano lesson
I’m just a Brooklyn Boy

I’m just a B-r-o-o-k-l-y-n
I’ll probably sing it once again
I’m just a B-r-o-o-k-l-y-n
Brooklyn Boy

(Music and lyrics by O. Fruchtman)

(©2010 A. Fruchtman)

[Here's a link to Oscar performing the song live — “Brooklyn Boy” .]

Then the Brooklyn Boy went to Princeton and after appearing in some
Triangle Club shows there, he started making his way in the showbiz
world.

He began playing the guitar and singing with Princeton classmate and friend Ed
(Woody) Allen and later I joined the two of them and we formed a band –
Oscar and The League Of Weenies.  In 1974 we became the first band ever
hired to play at the club CBGB and two weeks later we were the first band
ever fired from playing at CBGB.  All through the early and mid-70s
Oscar was hanging around some of the most creative people on the New
York scene, especially the folks involved in the early years of the TV
show Saturday Night Live.  At one point Michael O’Donoghue, the head
writer for the show said,” You know, all Oscar needs is a little
success.”  But Oscar never found any real commercial success and at
crucial moments he seemed to have a special knack for sabotaging his
opportunities and, frankly, manipulating and ultimately alienating
people.  I asked him once about this tendency and he said, ”Well, you
know my motto – I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” And so – he
did!

And he turned away from the traditional path  and became his own
creative universe. He was a poet, a singer and songwriter, a street
performer, a painter, a collagist . . .  A message from Oscar on your
answering machine might be a miniature masterpiece.  I’m now holding up
a business card he had made up for a fictional concern located on
Medford Avenue in Fairlawn, N.J.  And the outfit is called: “Mind Your
Own Business!“ and their slogan is “Don’t Call Us and We Won’t Call
You!”.

You didn’t hear Oscar on the radio or see him on TV, but the whole
world was his canvas.  And he travelled with a mission.  He was seeking
the essential humorous truth of life.  And this was his exacting
discipline: He was the master of taking any situation, finding the
precise comic center and putting it into words – words that made you
laugh.  In my opinion he was quite simply the funniest person ever.  Nor
did it matter if he was the butt of the joke – what was paramount was
the comic truth. And he filled his memorable songs with humor and they
overflow with warmth and humanity.

So this was a brief attempt to take the measure of my friend Oscar
Fruchtman.  He was a luftmensch who had enough adventures and burnt
enough bridges for several lifetimes.  He loved his family, he loved his
friends, he loved his music and, above all, he loved to create
laughter, that rarest ability and his special gift to all.  Oscar, you
did a lot of surprising things in your life, but what you did on
Saturday surprised me the most.  And Janet and Annie and Peter and I
will never forget you, because you are unforgettable.  And we are so
proud we had the chance to share your time on earth.

Rabbi Cosgrove said he was going to pull on his earlobe if  I was
talking too long and he hasn’t done that yet, so I’m going to get out
my guitar and sing a song Oscar and I wrote – it’s mostly Oscar, but I
contributed a little.

(While getting set up, I took a swig from a bottle of Poland Spring
[from the audience, Janet Moss, Oscar’s mom, “Drinking on the job!”])

This song is very appropriate for this setting and you’ll hear why. 
It’s called “Floating Away” . . .

FLOATING AWAY

‘Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about building a boat
'Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

Everybody laughed when he talked about building his craft and floating
He talked about taking two of each kind
He talked about leaving it all behind
And he grabbed his hat and he grabbed his coat
And he mumbled something about floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

Hey, what’s with Noah? If he don’t move that ark they’re going to tow
it away
But he just ripped up the ticket and he stowed it away
Cause he’s soon to be floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

First there came the wind – I hope he’ll let us in
Then there came the rain, maybe Noah’s not insane!

‘Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about building a boat
'Twas the night that Noah went crazy
And he started to talk about floating away

For forty days it rained then the sky was clear and the land was dry
And the bird of peace flew by and Noah got high
And again he was floating away

Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say
For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day

(Music by Oscar Fruchtman/Lyrics by Oscar Fruchtman and Hugh McCarten)

(©2010 A. Fruchtman/H. McCarten)

BOB DYLAN'S MICRO FICTION

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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.

THE REAL DEAL

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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.

EPIPHANY

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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.]

O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM — IN THE HEART

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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”?

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

THE CHRISTMAS SONG — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.


CHRISTMAS ISLAND — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

THE FIRST NOËL — IN THE HEART

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                                                                                                                    [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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

SILVER BELLS — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

MUST BE SANTA — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

O, COME, ALL YE FAITHFUL (ADESTE FIDELES) — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.

THE CHRISTMAS BLUES — IN THE HEART

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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.

Back to the Christmas In the Heart track list page.