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The Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan Goes Public
It might be said that over the past few weeks Bob Dylan has gone
public. He has shown up to see Paul Smith and Muddy Waters and
Ramblin' Jack Elliott; he has sat in at the Other End; he has hung
out. One night around three in the morning, after Bobby Neuwirth's
club set, Dylan sat and performed new material for over an hour at the
Other End bar--a song about Joey Gallo, a song about marrying
Isis--and except for Muddy Waters all of the aforementioned musicians
were part of an audience that included more than one journalist and
several hundred gawkers. Also present was that old Dylan imitator, Ian
Hunter, who was having his head blown off--not only had Dylan
identified him as a member of Mott the Hoople (which he's not any
more, as if Hunter could care) but he'd known all the tracks on
Hunter's (or was it Mott's) first album. Unbelievable.
This is news. For almost a decade, Dylan's need to armor himself
against the attentions of his admirers has played a large part in the
way we think about him--even though sightings have been common sine
early 1968, it has been the alarming 18-month period of complete
seclusion just before then that's stuck in our minds. Of course, all
that began to change subtly after his 1974 tour with the Band. If it's
going too far to say that Dylan has been demythified, then at least
what remained of his divinity has dissipated, with all his party
scenes and benefits and rumors reduced to the goings-on of a Major
Rock Star who can almost keep his co-stars' groups straight. But since
for his acolytes from the folk days these hootenanny visitations seem
to portend a New Eden, old friends singing songs of innocence and
experience together once again, it is well to remind ourselves that
the beginnings of the change were quite unelevated--commonplace almost
by definition, sine they served to reintroduce Dylan to the
commonalty.
The process began with the tour itself, a Major Rock Event of a
familiar kind, and was accelerated by reports of breaches in that
magical domestic fortress that had long separated Dylan from ordinary
mortals. But it has also involved a fact that is arguably as much
economic as it is artistic: a sudden profusion of recorded material
following three years of near-drought, years that yielded a total of
eight new tracks, a movie score, and a corporate rip-off. In contrast,
the past 18 months have brought forth five discs (not counting two
halves by the Band)--four albums, two of them doubles: Planet
Waves, Before the Flood, Blood on the Tracks, and
the newly released Basement Tapes.
The critical front-runner among these albums is clearly Blood on
the Tracks. I myself called it Dylan's best since John Wesley
Harding when it came out in January--and then didn't play it three
times before I began to write this piece. Listening now, I am stirred
once again by the tact and persistent musicality of "Lily, Rosemary
and the Jack of Hearts" and by the dovetailing delicacy of "Tangled Up
in Blue" (lost love recalled) and "Buckets of Rain" (love's loss
foreseen)--stirred, in fact, by the sheer craft of the whole
endeavor. Dylan has never been a confessional writer, but this control
of aesthetic distance on Blood on the Tracks is a small coup:
"Tangled Up in Blue," which cannot describe the facts of his life, and
"You're a Big Girl Now," which can, are both enlivened by the same
seemingly autobiographical intimacy, but both are without question
comely objects first and foremost.
That's the critic in me talking, of course, the same fellow who's
always making deadline judgments before the listener in me has a
chance to live with the music. The listener admires Blood on the
Tracks, likes it a lot, but he thinks: it's meaningless to call it
Dylan's best album since John Wesley Harding when he never
feels like putting it on. To the listener, Blood on the Tracks
sounds suspiciously like product, and when it comes to product he
happens to prefer Steely Dan to Dylan just as he prefers Hydrox to
Oreos or Lorna Doones.
Not that Dylan is capable of putting out product in the manner of a
Major Rock Professional. He has always resisted that. It has been his
practice to just go into the studio and cut, so that a lot of what
gets onto the LP you buy in the store is first and second takes. Chuck
Berry and the early Beatles were recorded this way, but over the past
decade it has become customary (if not compulsory) to put more quality
control into the manufacture of rock and roll, and Blood on the
Tracks sounds as if it consents to what is best about such
standards. It has pace, flow, variety; it tolerates few if any gaffes;
it is well made. This is partly because Dylan decided to
re-record some of the original Eric Weissberg sessions with other
musicians in Minneapolis, which enabled him to combine two different
musical moods on the same disc. Much more telling, though, is the way
the record shifts vocally, from a mock-callow whine to variants on the
rounder and juicier rock and roll voice of New Morning and
Greatest Hits Volume II.
Dylan's alacrity in the studio hardly commits him to spontaneity,
especially to spontaneity as it is commonly understood--the free play
of the undefended self and so forth. On the contrary, Dylan is always
guarded--he knows almost exactly what will happen when he
records. Each release is intended to objectify a preordained concept
that is both quickened and preserved for posterity by his instant
studio technique. Particularly since Blonde on Blonde, the
vehicle of each concept has been a voice that in some way exemplifies
it, the most extreme example being the high lonesome tenor of
Nashville Skyline. This is to say that Dylan has continually
and deliberately remodeled his singing voice, with a dual purpose: to
project himself into the world and to armor himself against it. For
him to relax this control on Blood on the Tracks is yet another
kind of going public. But it also relinquishes the obsessiveness that
makes eccentric records like Planet Waves and Before the
Flood so compelling for me.
Unlike many people I admire, I've never played my Dylan records
repeatedly or even regularly. Their conceptual strictness has
discouraged both easy listening--even Nashville Skyline, for
all its calculated pleasantness, never fit smoothly into my days--and
full personal identification. And so the listener in me subconsciously
vetoes the critic; there are times when I crave a specific Dylan
record with a fervor of the will no other artist can arouse in me, and
I value him immensely for that, but only rarely can he just be part of
a stack. Lacking the totally committed professionalism of
meaningful/listenable masterpieces like Layla and Exile on
Main Street, Blood on the Tracks fails to achieve what I
suspect was intended for it--a place in the stack with just such
records, all of which it melts or freezes just because it is so
distinctively Dylan. I could make up reasons explaining why it's as
precise conceptually as anything he's done--the many voices of love,
something like that--and there's no way it won't rank high in my
year-end top 10. But it's a half-measure.
The Basement Tapes, on the other hand, is no kind of measure at
all, and that is its secret. These are the famous lost songs recorded
with the Band at Big Pink in 1967 and later bootlegged on The Great
White Wonder and elsewhere. Of the 18 Dylan compositions included,
12 have by now been heard in legitimate commercial versions by other
artists, and another, "Down in the Flood," was recut by Dylan himself
for Greatest Hits Volume II; one of the remaining five, "Going
to Acapulco," has never ever been bootlegged, and neither have any of
the six Band songs, which I would adjudge to be among their very best
work. Sound quality has been greatly improved. Greil Marcus, who wrote
the notes, tells me he hears instruments that are entirely inaudible
on his second-generation tape. All of which begins to sketch in the
complicated recording history of work that was never meant to be
reproduced at all.
Well, not quite. The Band songs are relatively polished; it is said
that the scaricomic "Yazoo Street Scandal" was presented as a demo to
Clive Davis, who rejected it. But the Dylan songs are work tapes at
best, first stabs at arrangements barely roughed out, preliminary even
by Dylan's abrupt standards. The main reason they were taped was so
that they could be transcribed and copyrighted by Albert Grossman's
office. They weren't ever supposed to go out to other artists, much
less be circulated among the faithful as proof that the avatar was
alive and creative in Woodstock. So the music is certifiably
unpremeditated, a candid shot from a hero who has turned to his
friends and coworkers after coming too close to death to enjoy the
arrogance of power any longer. The concepts that are to arise from
this interaction among equals will eventually take form as the dry,
contained John Wesley Harding and the supercharged, eccentric
Music From Big Pink; at this juncture, however, artist and
group have arrived at a more moderate synthesis, merely simple and
quirkish, and couldn't care less whether they're only passing
through. No organizing principle keeps the music in line.
The basement tapes were the original laid-back rock, early
investigations of a mode that would eventually come to pervade the
whole music. Not that they suggested any of the complacent slickness
now associated with the term--just that they were lazy as a river and
rarely relentless or precise. In 1967, this was impermissible. Even
the Grateful Dead, who were also trying to meld individualistic
musicians into a rocking flow while rummaging through the American
mythos with an antirealistic aesthetic, were so fixated on the triumph
of Sgt. Pepper that they forsook the sweet relaxation of their
debut album for Anthem of the Sun, a technologically brilliant
failure. An inspired artificiality was the rule. I suspect that both
Dylan and the Band were afraid, if not consciously then instinctively,
that their concepts had to be strong and pure if they were to survive
this heady competition. So instead of nurturing the basement music,
they transformed simple into dry and contained and quirkish into
supercharged and eccentric. And maybe they did right. Remember that
the bootlegs didn't show up until 1969; I wonder how they would have
been received in late 1967.
But I wonder primarily for purposes of argument. I find this music
irresistible, and I can't believe that any slicking up to which Dylan
and his boys might have succumbed would have harmed it. Like a drunk
falling out of a first-story window, it's just too loose to break
much. Over the years it's been the more writerly "serious" songs that
people have talked about--not only "I Shall Be Released" (omitted
here), but "Tears of Rage," "This Wheel's on Fire," "Too Much of
Nothing," "Nothing Was Delivered"--and to this group can now be added
"Going to Acapulco," which I would describe (roughly) as the lament of
the singer-songwriter as gigolo, so mournful about "going to have some
fun" that he anticipates the watchtower: "Now when someone offers me a
joke I just say no thanks/I try to tell it like it is and keep away
from pranks."
Like the others, this is a richly suggestive piece of work, and like
the others--especially "Tears of Rage"--it's all the richer for being
surrounded by pranks. The many nonsense songs here are unequalled in
Dylan's work; even Greil Marcus's comparisons to the likes of "Froggy
Went A-Courtin'" falls a little short. Could Pecos Bill boast: "I can
drink like a fish/I can crawl like a snake/I can bite like a turkey/I
can slam like a drake"? Could Carl Perkins tell Sam Phillips: "Gonna
save my money and rip it up!"? What are we to make of Turtle, "With
his checks all forged/And his cheeks in a chunk"? And why don't you
get that apple off your fly?
These songs are too contemporary to be subject to pop notices of
timeliness. Just as "Going to Acapulco" is a dirge about having fun,
so "Don't Ya Tell Henry" is a ditty about separation from self, and
when the complementary irony of these two modes combines with the
Band's more conventional ("realistic") approach to lyrics, the mix
that results can be counted on to make as much sense in 1983 as it did
in 1967. The power of melody-lyric-performance transcends petty
details of sound levels (which vary enough to shock any well-respected
studio technician) and shifting vocal styles. We don't have to bow our
heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have
been the best album of 1967, too. The music is so free I bet it can
even be stacked, but I've been playing it too repeatedly to find out.
What is most lovable about the album, though, is simply the way it
unites public and private, revealing a Dylan armed in the mystery of
his songs but divested of the mystique of celebrity with which we has
surrounded his recording career for almost a decade. It would be
impossible to plan such exposure, and however much the album's release
has to do with generous royalties from CBS or the supposed sagging of
the Band, it 's nice to know that he feels secure enough to do
it. There he is, folks. When he giggled at the beginning of "Bob
Dylan's 115th Dream" he was just being coy; the mishap ceased to be a
mishap once it was pressed and released. But when he almost breaks out
laughing in the middle of "Please, Mrs. Henry," he's really there.
The night after Dylan's impromptu bar concert, I checked out the Other
End, not so much for the listener in me as for the critic/journalist,
who didn't expect Dylan to show and would have felt like an asshole to
miss him. What all of us got instead was some good music--Jack Elliott
and Mick Ronson backing Patti Smith on "Angel Baby" qualifies as a
blessed event--and much okay music and Bobby Neuwirth scratching his
own back. I found the vibes insular and self-satisfied. But Dylan is
reported to be happy to be back on the street again, and if it makes
him happy then I'm happy too. Good music happens there.
When I talk about Dylan going public, though, that won't be what I
mean. I'll be talking about The Basement Tapes, the
singer-songwriter exposed in front of hundreds of thousands--I hope
millions--of listeners. What a friendly thing to do.
Village Voice, Aug. 4, 1975
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