Mick Hartley

It’s often the case that you hear music afresh when it comes at you unexpectedly. Hearing Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” last night on Charlie Gillett’s world music show on Radio London was like that. Not that it’s a track I’m unfamiliar with – it was one of my choices for the normblog Dylan poll – but still, how often do you hear it on the radio?…”When you’re lost lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Easter time too…..”.

There’s a wonderful article on Dylan by Luc Sante in the NYRB; mainly a review of “Chronicles“. He looks at the way Dylan links to the past, a theme of much of Chronicles:

The young Dylan believed fervently in the passing of the torch, the laying on of hands—he learned blues chord changes from Lonnie Johnson and Victoria Spivey, visited the paralytic Woody Guthrie in the hospital and played him his own songs (he doesn’t mention here a more purely magical transference, when Buddy Holly looked directly at him from the stage of the Duluth Armory in 1959, a few days before his death in a plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa). And while he was never as extreme as the folk purists, who were so involved with the past that they lived there, like Civil War reenactors who become experts on nineteenth-century underwear, Dylan treated history in a way that was not uncommon then but is sufficiently rare now that some critics of this book have professed their suspicions. In 1961 the past was alive not just in the songs but in the city itself—everybody who played at the Café Bizarre on Macdougal Street knew the place had once been Aaron Burr’s livery stable.

There’s also an interesting take on Dylan’s falling standards from the early Seventies:

Speaking to David Gates in the Newsweek interview that heralded the release of Chronicles, he went so far as to claim that his artistic drought lasted from sometime in the early Seventies until 1998, when he issued his record Time out of Mind. Gates bit his tongue: “He’s talking about the 25 years that produced Blood on the Tracks, Slow Train Coming, Shot of Love, Infidels and its sublime outtakes, and—no. Let’s not argue with the man who’s in possession of what really matters.”

Sante thinks Dylan knows what he’s saying here: that Blood on the Tracks, despite being many people’s favourite Dylan album, is too self-conscious, too controlled:

[Y]et, in comparison to the songs on Blonde on Blonde or The Basement Tapes, which are genuine, sphinx-like, irreducible, hard-shell poems whether or not the words can ever be usefully divorced from the music, such numbers as “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Idiot Wind” are prose. They are driven by their narratives, and their imagery is determined by its function.

That seems right to me. After The Basement Tapes, the easy unconscious genius of early Dylan had gone. I’m just not so sure it came back with Time out of Mind.