RSSThe Big Lookback: Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint
"Dylan Album of the Decade," from "Creem," 1973
Robert Christgau
I no longer recall the exact timing or mechanics that led me to shock my rockcrit colleagues by naming Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint's Lo and Behold my 1973 album of the year. By then, McGuinness Flint was a recognizable UK band constructed around Manfred Mann sidemen, which is not to say many rock fans cared, especially in the U.S; guitarist Coulson, also a Brit, is even harder to track down. As it happens, my CD of Lo and Behold, the pick hit that concerns me here, is on the Raven label along with a tiny sticker that says "Made in Australia." I can no longer locate my vinyl version.
But there was Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint vinyl in the back of my Toyota station wagon in 1973, when I celebrated my wedding-bound crush on Carola Dibbell by initiating a long cross-country jaunt that came equipped with both a suitcase stereo and dozens of LPs, the Manfred Mann-produced Lo and Behold included. These albums we set up wherever we spent more than a night—in Florence, South Carolina, for instance. And that's not counting, I can't resist recalling, the young black hitchhiker who told us he'd begun his own trek at the Whitestone Bridge in Queens, thousands of miles from where we picked him up in New Mexico. He cradled his own portable LP player in his arms to avoid skipping as he played LPs, mostly or entirely ours I'm pretty sure.
This actually happened, I swear. But not until a thousand miles later, when we spent a week with my onetime Dartmouth roommate and future Canadian novelist George Szanto in Laramie, Wyoming did we hunker down in his basement to play some LPs. These included Lo and Behold, and I recall that spell downstairs as where the two of us both grokked an album and bonded even deeper with each other. We played it for our pals when we stopped off at the Creem house in Michigan as we headed east. Consists entirely of Dylan covers, some quite obscure (at least they were then, two years ahead of the release of The Basement Tapes), which is by no means to apologize for the material. "Dylan Album of the Decade" was the headline for the Creem review below. Amazon says the album's still for sale. I say it hasn't lost a step.
In my third or fourth fit of enthusiasm, I think this is the best record of the year and the best Dylan record since John Wesley Harding. Which last requires immediate qualification. This record contains 10 unfamiliar-to-unheard-of songs written (or anyway, copy-righted) by Bob Dylan between 1963 and 1971. It was produced by Manfred Mann, whom Dylan once named the best interpreter of his songs. The musicians are Dennis Coulson (vocals), Dixie Dean (bass), Tom McGuiness (guitar) and Hughie Flint (drums). Three of these guys (the two obvious ones plus Coulson, who played keyboards) were in a band called McGuiness Flint that put out a couple of records on Capitol several years ago. McGuiness Flint had one hit, "When I'm Dead and Gone," and some favorable reviews. Their admirers compared them to the Band, but although I listened more than once to both albums I finally decided they weren't even worth mentioning. Nondescript country-rock. I've never been crazy for the Band, either.
Nor have I ever been what you'd call mad for Dylan, which may explain why I am so, yes, thrilled by this record. Don't get me wrong—I knew the man was a genius even when he was playing the folkie, and he's always seemed like the rocker most certain to last, whatever that will mean. But that was appreciation, not adulation or imitation. I was not a nut. I mean, remember all those perfectly, sensible people who damn near lived for the next Dylan record, who charted their lives by what they thought he was saying, as if he were a walking horoscope for disenchanted amateur litcrits. Maybe you were one of those yourself. If you're reading this, you probably weren't one of the real kooks, many of whom are now drifting in some occult backwater as their Exemplar goes into hiding for real by making his availability boring.
Me, I kept my distance, just like Dylan himself. No contact too intimate, no obsession too permanent. I never finished Scaduto's biography and I never even started Gray's exegesis: I never sought out the bootlegs. And if I bought my records, I'd think before I laid down cash for this one—it looks pretty chancy. Which is too bad, because this a powerful illustration of why Dylan mattered. It's a history lesson: Bob Dylan—"Yesterday" and Today. Or it's Greatest Hits Volume II with nothing but new stuff. Or it's a testament from the most sensible Dylan nut of all, Manfred Mann, who has organized scraps of persona that Dylan himself couldn't handle and reminded us of everything the genius has been. He loves the man more than the man seems to love himself any more.
To call this Mann's record is not to ignore Dennis Coulson, who must have been hiding on those McGuinness-Flint albums until melodies as elegiac (and as early Dylan) as "Eternal Circle" and "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" came his way. It would be blasphemous to suggest that Coulson does these songs better than Dylan could himself. But his relatively sweet and conventional musicality does add a note of inspired directness to the 1963-1964 songs. Dylan's superiority on the choppy, ironic later songs is more clear-cut, but Coulson does interpret these with appropriate humor and punch. In neither case does he sop over into literalness—Baezesque prettifying or Bandesque uglifying. He knows Dylan's lyrics for the lazy, flirtatious embraces of perception that they are. Nor is it to ignore the musicians themselves. Mann's own Earth Band has done a version of "Get Your Rocks Off" that isn't half as strong and clear as the one available here. This is partly Coulson—the Earth Band does quite deliberately without a real singer—but partly the virtuoso folk-rock playing of the others. Folk-rock, or country-rock, is all the music can be called, yet where Arif Mardin or Lenny Waronker and the usual studio guys can be counted on always to add the tasteful riff—the just-so flourish, the swelling rhythm—this music remains jagged. It rocks and it rolls, but it doesn't just pass over or around you; it seems somehow to stop short every now and then. A producer can direct such energy, but he can't fabricate it.
Nevertheless, this is Mann's record. The arrangements, for instance, probably do more to make the music work than the playing itself. Mann lets those songs which can carry their own weight do so, but on two relatively tuneless early compositions—"Let Me Die in My Footsteps" and "The Death of Emmett Till"—he is careful to add a hook, a tabla and a classic build arrangement, respectively. The clownish horns on "Don't You Tell Henry" are a hook for the whole album and certainly an entree to side two. In addition, someone—maybe Coulson or Dylan, more likely Mann—has eliminated stanzas here and there and taken a long recitative out of the seven minute finale, "Sign of the Cross."
As so often, the selection of material really defines the album. These songs are contradictory in spirit—cynical and-idealistic, silly and profound, confused and self- reliant—but they are always tough and intelligent and usually funny. Insofar as they are about anything but themselves they turn out to be about the same stuff as the run of escapist singer-songwriter junk—musicianly dedication and alienation, the need for personal freedom, the sense of growing up and out. But they are virtually without self-pity, and it is to Mann's credit that he has carefully included a seemingly unredeemable protest song, "Emmett Till," in the line-up.
The one semi-false note is "Sign on the Cross," which I take to be about Dylan's Jewishness (the sign on the cross said: Jesus Christ King of the Jews). It is questionable for a WASP like Coulson to sing such a song, although Dylan's characteristic evasiveness and talent for gospelly overtones provides an escape. In another way, it is in questionable taste for Dylan to write it—for once, he does come perilously close to feeling sorry for himself. But although Mann closes with the song, he has provided an antidote earlier on. Here are four lines from "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," some prophetic 1963 advice which Dylan might do well to heed right now:
I don't know if I'm smart but I think I can see
When someone is pullin' the wool over me
And if this war comes and death's all around
Let me die on this land 'fore I die underground
Let me die in my footsteps
Before I go down under the ground.