Bob Dylan: Sometimes He Talks Crazy, Crazy Like a Song
nytimes.com
"Bob Dylan: `Love and Theft'
Columbia 85975; to be released on
Sept. 11
There's an old man who lives in your
neighborhood, drinking away his days as if
they were bottles. He lives by himself in a
small house, though others are known to
disappear into it: "Samantha Brown, lived in my
house for about four or five . . . months," he
announces one day on the street, his voice
tearing like cloth. "I never slept with her
eeeeeven once." As if anyone cares.
An odd character, in his funny way of nodding
as you walk by, in the cadence of his speech
when he stops to pass the time — one moment
he might be whispering a confidence, the next
giving a speech — but also ordinary. He does
nod, he does pass the time. On occasion he
asks you in, you and your spouse or another
neighbor, asks you into his parlor — which
really is a parlor. A few old, comfortable
chairs, shelves of books. There's a spinet piano
with a collection of sheet music in the
compartment in the piano bench, some of it
handwritten: his own songs.
Not everything is old-fashioned. The '65
Mustang in the garage and the '59 Cadillac at
the curb seem to promise a future that merely
hasn't arrived yet. Along with the floral lampshades and throw rugs there's a CD
player and hundreds of CD's, though most are of blues and country tunes
recorded in the 1920's and 1930's. "See if there's anything you want to hear," he
always says, without taking his eyes off you as you choose.
He's an explainer. One of the songs he sings at the piano, one of his own, is
called "Po' Boy," though the tune sounds like the folk song "Cocaine." With a wry
couplet ("Call down to room service, say send up the room") and a knock-knock
joke, it tells a story about the Prodigal Son. Seeing you pick a Bukka White CD
with his version of the song, or anyway the title — recorded at Parchman State
Penitentiary in Mississippi in 1939, the man points out — he leans back and lets
the burst of guitar notes that seem to send this "poor boy long way from home"
straight to heaven wash over him like rain, then shows you Ramblin' Thomas's
1929 "Poor Boy Blues" ("A Dallas street singer," he says), then Chuck Berry's
1964 "Promised Land," about the odyssey of "the Po' Boy" from his hometown,
Norfolk, Va., to Los Angeles.
The song was written when Berry was in federal prison in Springfield, Mo., the
man tells you ("When he wanted an atlas to get the route right, they thought he
was planning an escape!"), but he's just warming up. "See, what the song is
really about is the civil rights movement, the Freedom Riders, the way he plans
the Po' Boy's bus route to avoid Rock Hill, that's in North Carolina, a Klan town,
then the bus breaks down in Birmingham, where the Klan blew up a church and
killed four little girls, that was in 1963, `turned into a struggle,' see? It's all in this
book by a professor named W. T. Lhamon, `Deliberate Speed.' " Nobody has any
idea what he's talking about, but the story is romantic, somehow.
The man's own songs have pleasant names like "Bye and Bye" or "Moonlight."
The way he sings and plays them, with a phony-looking toothpaste smile,
suggests how he once tried to sell them. In moments they sound ridiculously
corny — less like Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust" than Jeanette MacDonald and
Nelson Eddy's "Indian Love Call" — or it's a parlor from the 19th century that
comes into view, and you almost hear the old sentimental songs of home and
courtship, family, death and renewal, even though the songs are off. They're not
as slick as the published tunes that keep them company in the piano bench —
though you can tell they were meant to be. Often they end with a sourness, a
sting, even a violence, that parlors were made to banish from their doors.
The man takes midnight walks, tramping the streets even to the edge of town,
muttering about all he hates, about everything he wants to destroy, preaching or
telling dirty stories, gesturing wildly, his hair flying. One night you heard him
going on about a woman, it seemed, but then he turned into a general on his
horse as quickly as the horse then turned into a pulpit and the general into a
prophet. "I'm going to spare the defeated, I'm going to speak to the crowd," he
said, whoever he really was. "I'm going to teach peace to the conquered, IIIIII'm
going to tame the proud."
Sometimes he sounds crazy, but the same sound can be seductive, especially in
his seeming disdain for all those he wants dead, banished, out of his world. You
catch something strange and glamorous in his voice: how you might feel if you
had the nerve to talk like this. And it can happen right in his house. Suddenly he
is speaking with such intensity that you hear his rants as songs and imagine a
band behind them. He begins to speak loudly, angrily, hitting random blues riffs
on his piano, then slamming down hard and turning to you to speak of the fun
he's had and that he might — and here he is weirdly threatening — have again.
"You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice," he says, though you haven't
said a word. "I sell it to you at a reduced price."
Once he told a story about a flood, then began to sing it, without the piano: "You
have to hear a banjo now," he'd said. What followed felt more mystical than real.
It was the great 1927 Mississippi flood, it was Noah's flood, it was Iowa just last
spring, it was the entire last century as a giant mistake, crying out for its own
cleansing, asking to be washed away before it was too late. "Made it to Kansas
City," he says of someone called Big Joe Turner: in his mouth the words seem to
name as well Davy Crockett, Jesse James, John Henry, Stagger Lee, Railroad
Bill, each bestriding the continent. He plays with old songs inside the story — the
mountain ballad "The Coo Coo," say, turning the benign lyrics inside out, or
revealing their true menace.
"The coo coo, she's a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies," he says with easy
pleasure, then changing into Robert Mitchum's preacher in "The Night of the
Hunter," still smiling: "I'm preaching the word of God, I'm putting out your
eyes." Then he goes back to the piano and sings about how he hopes she'll meet
him in the moonlight. Then he passes out, and everyone leaves.
The stories people tell of the nights they've spent with the man have long since
become local legend. But the legend that sticks hardest comes from what people
will call "Sugar Baby": the message the man leaves on his answering machine
when he leaves town. Given what people have heard before, as they listen they
can almost spin the slow, deliberate words of the message into singing, and the
singing into an elegant orchestration of slow, deliberate chords — something that
years from now they won't be able to get out of their heads. "Sugar Baby," they'll
still say to each other, probably long after the man himself is dead; it's become a
saying, meaning "That's life" or "There's nothing we can do about it."
Some people will remember how the man used to take out an album by a
stone-faced character named Dock Boggs, a singer from the Virginia mountains,
who first recorded in 1927, the man would carefully explain; he'd play a song
called "Sugar Baby." That was real killer-inside-me stuff; "Sugar Baby" was what
Boggs called his lover, who you weren't sure would survive the song. On the
message the man leaves, "Sugar Baby" — the words leading off every refrain —
seems to be the name of a horse. The feeling, though — the sense of a life used
up, wasted as every life is finally wasted, leaving the earth as if one's life had
never been — is the same. The feeling is that there is all the time in the world to
take stock, if only in the ledger you keep in your heart to settle accounts, to tell
jokes you half hope no one will get. "I'm staying with Aunt Sally," the man says
on the machine, "but you know she not really my aunt." You laugh, and then
something in his tone pulls you down into the emptiness he's speaking from. As
in the parlor, he has led you to relax into his exile.
THAT is just a story. But "Love and Theft," Bob Dylan's first collection of new
songs in four years, is an album of stories, some told to the end, some of the
most remarkable only hinted at. "High Water Everywhere (For Charley Patton)" is
both.
Born perhaps as early as 1887 or as late as 1901, Patton, a founder of the
Mississippi Delta blues, recorded from 1929 until his death in 1934. "His vowels
were stretched out, inflated from within; they expanded until they were all but
unrecognizable," Tom Piazza wrote recently about how hard it can be to hear him
— but in the teasing murk of his sound, Piazza said, "he opened a window in
time for himself." It's that window Dylan walks through as if it were a door.
While you can find a transcription of the lyrics of Patton's "High Water
Everywhere" in John Fahey's 1970 book "Charley Patton," which is reprinted as
part of "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton," a
seven-CD boxed set due in October from Revenant Records, Patton's singing
could hardly be more underwater: "I firmly believe, and have believed for years,"
a friend says, "that Charley Patton is not singing in English on `High Water.' "
Compared with the dirt in Patton's voice, the rubble in Dylan's may sound as
smooth as glass, but the impenetrability of Patton's song is there in Dylan's: in
riddles and parables.
Verse by verse, the flood spreads, takes in and upends more lives, making
everyone understand that your freedoms under the Constitution are nothing
compared to what God wants from you this night. "You dancing with whom
they tell you to," Dylan has one Bertha Mason say, "or you don't dance at all."
"It's bad out there," a verse ends. "It's tough out there." "Things are breaking up
out there." But then in the midst of the disaster, a fable stands out as if clearing
its own space in the maelstrom. "Well," Dylan says, "George Lewes told the
Englishman, the Italian and the Jew" (who just walked into a bar):
You can't open up your minds, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't . . . care
Dissolving into mystery as soon as it seems clear, the story will be there as long
as any in Dylan's signature "Highway 61 Revisited," from 1965; this could be a
verse from it. But the heart of "Love and Theft" — the window Dylan's new
music itself opens up in time — is in that final "care," dropping off its line like a
body falling out of a window, with the same thud. A whole world of rejection, of
nothingness, of the humor shared by dead men walking because the graveyard is
full — a whole way of being in the world, and a whole way of talking about it,
opens up out of that single word, out of the way it's thrown away, and what it
throws away with it. As Raymond Chandler had his detective Philip Marlowe say
in 1953 in "The Long Goodbye," in the same voice: "It all depends on where you
sit and what your private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care." Then
Marlowe went out and solved the case. "
Greil Marcus is the author of ``The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob
Dylan's Basement Tapes,'' a new edition of his``Invisible Republic,'' which will
be published this month by Picador USA. |
