Tag: Bob Dylan

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One More Label Before I Go

Bob Dylan: King of Country Music

Taking the voice of both subject and object, in 1964, Bob Dylan put out one of his defining public statements in the song, All I Really Want to Do. 

He assures his lover that he has no interest in classifying, categorising, advertising, finalising, defining or confining her. The same lyrics can be read as well, as a plea to his fans for a reciprocal respect.  

And yet, here I go.  

Alongside the many ‘Hello! My name is…’ stickers we’ve slapped on his lapel—voice of a generation, Nobel Laureate, fundamentalist whack job, protest singer—I would like to suggest the following: Bob Dylan, King of Country Music.  

I’ve sensed this forever, but as I listened to a mixtape I posted recently, it has become clear as day.   

Dylan was not just inspired by Hank Williams, Cash and Woody Guthrie, he has throughout his career, drawn deeper on the well water of country music than any other so-called genre. It wouldn’t be too hard to argue that very few albums in his vast catalogue are NOT country or country-rock albums.  Bringing it All Home; Highway 61 Revisited; Street Legal jump to mind immediately. Of course there are some others too, but generally the sonic atmosphere of country music and his approach to his art is heavy and sticky with Mississippi mud.  

I will go further. 

Dylan is a better country singer than a rock ‘n’ roll singer.  His voice tends to divide the public. A lot of people can’t stand it. Croaky, wheezy, shallow, awful, they saw.   I am obviously not in that camp though it’s hard to deny that of late it is pretty tuneless and frail. I prefer the adjective, quirky. Country music loves quirky; Bob’s nasally and rough delivery fits perfectly alongside that of others like Kris Kristofferson, Jimmie Dale Gilmore or even Willie Nelson.   So too his quirky pronunciation and phrasing. Very country. 

It works another way too. Some of his quirkiest songs, like Dogs Run Free, a wired and weird folk-jazz oddity on New Morning (1970), is transformed into a perfect country ballad on Another Self Portrait (1969–1971): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 10. Nothing weird or wired. A curly song like this works much better as straight-ahead country. As I’ve mentioned before Dylan’s Bootleg Series are chocker block with alt.country versions of almost every song he’s ever sung.  And often these studio scraps are better than his more famous rock and folk stuff.  Honestly.  

My I admit as evidence, One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) a sparkling, sneering gem from Blonde on Blonde (1966 and recorded in Nashville with country session players).  An all time personal favorite. But he also released an instrumental version on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: 1965–1966, The Cutting Edge. The song works in both idioms and as a western canter, outshines, for its short duration of 4 minutes 57 seconds, any Chet Atkins instrumental. 

At the height of his artistic powers he could release two outstanding albums in the same year, 1975. Blood on the Tracks, his mid-period masterpiece and The Basement Tapes, a double LP of random musical experiments and frolics that qualifies as the first perfectly formed album of ‘Americana’ music.  Both albums are perennial near-the-top finalists in every ‘Best Albums of Dylan’ list ever published.  

What followed in TBT’s wake (recorded 1967-68 but released in 1975) were John Wesley Harding (1967) a proto-Outlaw country album, and Nashville Skyline (1969) pure country pop in which Dylan channels Jim Reeves.   

Even during his ‘lost 80’s’ period, some of his most memorable songs were his country ones: You Wanna Ramble & Brownsville Girl (Knocked Down Loaded/1986); Silvio & Shenandoah (Down in the Groove/1988); The Ballad of Judas Priest (Dylan & The Dead/1989). The last is really a Grateful Dead track.  Dylan’s singing is pushed along by the band’s amazing rhythm section and Jerry Garcia’s delicious guitar, but it demonstrates that other masters recognised the country potential of his words and tunes. 

Let me wrap this up by asking you to listen to this version of I Shall Be Released, recorded live with Joan Baez on the Rolling Thunder tour.  Dylan’s voice is absolutely beautiful here. And Joan’s subtle but essential supporting vocals makes a fucking good song, a fucking masterpiece. It is such a spiritual, earthy rendition, with no artifice whatsoever.  

Bob never is so relaxed as when he sings his country stuff. His unique timbre and phrasing don’t grate or stand out as weird.  Sure, he was only 34 when he recorded this, but his voice is not just physically strong, his performance is one of complete commitment.  Whereas his mid 60s stuff sometimes comes off as angry and performative, in this and most of his other country-flavored repertoire, he is nothing but authentic and true. 

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Dylan’s Turn of Phrase

I was lucky to get a pass to a pre-release viewing of A Complete Unknown, the new Dylan biopic, this week.  The event included a free drink (which turned out to be a Thatchers Gold Apple Cider in a can, which is so wrong on several levels) and an ‘Australian exclusive’ interview with director James Mangold and leading man, Timothée Chalamet. A great night. 

The film itself was very good. I can’t think of another film where an actor captured a character many of us think we know intimately, with near perfection. It was almost as if Dylan himself had morphallactic-ly returned to his early years in the physical form of Chalamet. All the essentials were there. His smirking disdain, his obsessions, his hair, the shades and the voice, bursting at the seams with creativity.  A stellar artistic performance by the actor.   

[Not to be discounted is Edward Norton as Pete Seeger. His understated performance as Dylan’s early champion is worth the price of a second ticket. The crushing disappointment he conveys when Woody Guthrie makes it clear Dylan is to be his successor, not Pete, is so good.] 

The Australian exclusive interview was prerecorded. It featured a local B grade entertainment interviewer who knew little of Dylan’s mystique or music and who received each response from Chalamet with a cooed ‘Ooo, that’s so great!’, more appropriate to an interview with parents of a severely disabled child or a granny fighting back against online scams.  Chalamet was pissed and swilled big gulps of vodka straight from the bottle. His answers were disjointed, sometimes coherent. He seemed to be channelling Dylan’s own irritated approach to dumb interviewers. For his part Mangold tried to keep disaster at bay by praising the drunken luvvy next to him and speaking of how they had ‘sculpted’ the performance and their relationship over ‘many years’.  O.K.

Definitely go see this film. 

As I walked to the cinema, I reflected for the umpteenth time on what it is about Bob Dylan that I love so much. I’m sure I could dig out several dozen reasons but the one that immediately jumped to mind was his ability to turn a phrase.  Though I’m a Dylan lifer, there are few if any songs of his that I could recite in their entirety. Maybe Blowing in the Wind if the wind were behind my back.  But I can rattle off dozens of phrases that absolutely live within my soul every day. 

All I really want to do, is baby be friends with you 

It ain’t me babe 

He not busy being born is busy dying 

She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks 

I contain multitudes 

Flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark 

I used to care, but things have changed 

Lincoln Country Road or Armageddon? 

A few words, seemingly simply, even thoughtlessly, placed together stand out like sparkling jewels throughout his work.  They are adornments. In Indian/Sanskrit aesthetics these are known are ‘alankara’, poetic ornaments or decorations designed to enhance the joy and delight of the reader/listener. 

I find myself repeating Dylan’s phrases at random moments and situations.  I get a kick out of marrying Dylan’s words with the situations and events of my meagre life. That feeling of delight, according to the ancient Indians, is the entire purpose of poetry, music, art and literature.  According to Vijay Kumar Roy, Associate Professor of English, University of Allahabad, “all artists are expected to have a kind of gift, through which imagination can provide the reader [something to] ‘savour’ or ‘relish’, [rasa, in Sanskrit], which is the highest form of joy or supreme bliss (delight). (1) 

Sometimes Dylan seems to throw all manner of phrases together, seemingly indifferent to whether they make sense as a whole narrative.  For years scholars and fans have tried to unpack and dissect the meaning of each of Dylan’s songs to find a coherent message.  Yet if you look at a song like It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) the phrases pile up and it’s hard to draw direct links of meaning between them. 

Darkness at the break of noon 
Shadows even the silver spoon 
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon 
Eclipses both the sun and moon 
To understand you know too soon 
There is no sense in trying 

Temptation’s page flies out the door 
You follow, find yourself at war 
Watch waterfalls of pity roar 
You feel to moan but unlike before 
You discover that you’d just be one more 
Person crying 

These verses are full of brilliant lines. Indeed, each line is full of meaning, but you’d be hard put to say exactly what he’s singing about. A simultaneous solar and lunar eclipse? Is the page of temptation a book or a young lad? I’ve seen waterfalls but don’t know what a waterfall of pity is and what that has to do with said page.  

But as the song progresses it’s clear Dylan is conjuring a scene of madness, darkness and confusion.  He is describing a disjointed disconnected modern society and so there is a certain rasa/taste to this song. Indian aesthetics identify 8 main ‘rasa’ or flavors that an artist may induce in a reader, observer or listener. One of them is Raudra: The Rasa of Anger and Fury which Dylan employs to demonstrate his righteous fury over the state of his country, society and times. It’s a heavy song. It’s got the weight of Jeremiah or Isaiah. But it is decorated and ornamented with the most beautiful turns of phrase. 

Darkness at the break of noon 
Shadows even the silver spoon 

While money doesn’t talk, it swears 

You never know how future generations will view yesterday’s heroes but it’s hard to imagine Dylan’s writing being forgotten.  His turns of phrase, dozens of them, have entered our daily banter.  

The times they are a changing.  

Blowing in the wind.   

It ain’t me, babe. 

You gotta serve somebody 

Pick up any of his records, or read his poems/lyrics on line and you’ll discover hundreds of magical delightful phrases that capture the whole gamut of human emotions. But which also mark Dylan as one of the greatest manipulators of words. 

Here is one of his phrases I use regularly, in a lot of situations. 

A change in the weather is known to be extreme 
But what’s the sense of changing horses in midstream? 
I’m going out of my mind, oh, oh 
With a pain that stops and starts 
Like a corkscrew to my heart 
Ever since we’ve been apart 

(You’re a Big Girl Now, Blood on the Tracks, 1974) 

  1. Roy, Vijay Kumar. 2012. “Indian Aesthetics and the West” In Explorations in Aesthetics, edited by Alka Rastogi. New Delhi: Sarup Book Publishers.