Bob Dylan making a call with my phone

I'm in my favorite coffeeshop, the Brooklyn Tea Lounge.   South Park later tonight is making fun of Guitar Hero.  Dylan's playing on the radio.

It's a good night.

I'm incredibly stoked for the release of the new Bob Dylan movie.  Bob Dylan is a legend.  His folk music would punch you in the face like an incubus.  He's going to disappear one day, then endure for generations.  I owe my philosophy to Bob Dylan.  I'm usually in the business of mistrustin' sacred cows, but I'm going to leave this guy alone.  I'm afraid he's going to up and die the second people stop paying attention to him.  And I'd really like him to live another 100 years.  Also, I'm hoping South Park does it first.

The best part about the movie is that they have six different performers reppin' Dylan.  My favorite is Richard Gere.  His casting is a masterstroke.  There's no bigger douchekit alive than Richard Gere.  Way to give western Buddhists a bad name, you gutter-feeding tripe.  However, Bob Dylan can be a bit of a douche too.  He's about 15% douche on any given day.  How perfect!  Who better to bring the douchekit side of Bob Dylan to the stage than aged douchekit Richard Gere.  Ooh... ooh... maybe he'll double up and play the fundamentalist Dylan!

For a long time, I've saved a slot at the top of my favorite albums list for Bob Dylan.  I've had one up for a while, but I'm eager to reconsider.  From now until the movie comes out, I'm going to 2log about my favorite Dylan albums, and try to decide what's at #1.

Most Fans Paid $0 for Radiohead Album screams Drudge.  Typical attempt at character assassination on his part, which is one of many reasons I love reading him.

Don't get me wrong.  Radiohead sucks.  But their album distribution idea was brilliant.  The people who paid $0 probably wouldn't have paid to listen to the album anyway.  Radiohead gets to reach a lot more ears this way.

More importantly, even if they only average $6 per album sold, this is a great deal for them.  I don't know what share of album sales they get in the store, but I bet it ends up at under $2.  They effectively tripled their take-home on this.  And nothing goes to middlemen.

Of course, I didn't bother to download it, even for free.  Your dastardly scheme won't work on me, villainous Radiohead!

The very first re-invention of Bob Dylan was Dylan as a protest singer.  It couldn't last.  This album falls in his early career, when he tried to stand for something.  Later, when he realized he couldn't do that, he decided to say nothing.  For most of Dylan's albums, anything he's trying to communicate gets lost behind a series of walls he throws up to confuse the listener.

The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is the best album on which he's not actively trying to confuse you.  Still, its most famous song, "Blowin' in the Wind," is merely a series of hauntingly unanswerable questions.  Dylan's never had answers.

A lot of people clung to this album as an anthem of the anti-war protests, but I don't think it works best as an anti-war album.  It's just a dude who wrote some poems about what he's thinking about, and putting it against some solid folk guitar to give things a little pep.

Basically, everything he's ever done is reflected on this album.  Sparse music.  Simple jokes.  Aloof comments.  Emotional imagery.  Partly about issues, but more heavily about emotions.  A few songs of note on this album:

• Masters of War isn't very good.  Partway through the song, he begs of the warmongerers: "And I hope that you die."  It sticks out for a reason.  It's his way of saying the song is a joke.  A pacifist wishing death upon somebody is a hypocrite.  He's still against the war, and the kernel of the song reflects it.  But it's not quite an anti-war ballad.  And it's not quite good.
• Don't Think Twice, It's All Right may be among his greatest songs.  He's confessing to himself, and all the women he's hurt, that he's a womanizing jerk.  And that he's going to hurt a lot of women.  He's not completely OK with it, but he's accepted this fact and has decided he's going to continue.
• A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall represents the type of song he'll eventually master over the course of his career.  Surrealist landscapes of unusual people and weird imagery form a sort of impressionist painting.  ShaZAM.

Camille Paglia, you sexy beast.  In the same column, you attack Hillarycare, endorse B-Rock, stick it to ManBearPig, and pay appropriate homage to Stevie Ray Vaughan.  I can't get behind the Ellen hatred, (though she's definitely brought it on herself.)  Please do me a favor and continue being amazing.

Also in the same issue, you make some terrible choices for sexiest man alive.  But Kanye?  Judd Apatow?  Owen Wilson?  Ira Glass?  I'm not exactly into dudes, (don't be fooled by the moustache), but I'm more than able to recognize who is, and who ain't.  And they ain't. The only one in the top ten that I can approve of is Cate Blanchett at #4.  Commenters, what dudes are hot?

In advance of the new Dylan movie, I'm 2logging about some Dylan albums.

Yawn?  Why can't I get excited about this album?

I know.  Because it's a watered down version of Freewheelin'.  Protests, civil rights, and hippie ideals are all good stuff, but it clearly doesn't float Dylan's boat.  That's fine.  This album is a half-hearted attempt to vibe on counter-culture spirit, but he clearly lacks the fire in his belly to make it happen.

However, among the mediocrity on this album, a couple of songs shine.  With God on Our Side is, hands down, his finest anti-war song.  Basically, he just croons about how easily religions get abused to justify opposing points of view.  Hey folks... stop thinking. God Herself told me that we must win, and She hates the other dudes, so the only moral recourse is to slaughter them.  By golly... that's pretty much exactly what I was striking at in my B-rock post the other day!

The Times They Are A-Changin' is a great campfire song.  But so what?  Kumbaya is too.

When the Ship Comes In will wreck your mind, however.  Just thinking about the lyrics makes me want to get up and dance, (something no Dylan music could actually make me do).  One morning, a ship is rolling along.  But this is no ordinary ship.  When mother nature sees this ship, she stops the wind, moves the fishies out of the way, and rolls out a golden carpet made of sand for this ship.  Then, suddenly this ship is in town.  The townsfolk panic and die.  It's a slow song, and the lyrics make it seem like the ship is sort of drifting along slowly.  It's the hour the ship comes in after all, not the minute the ship comes in.  Yet the whole thing happens in the blink of an eye.  It's a big ole' hurricane.  An amazing song about brute force, shoved into a seemingly anti-war album.

I think the legacy of this bad boy will improve with time.  Probably in 50 years, I'll think it's my faves.  But I'm impatient, so I'll dump it to the bottom of the stack.

In advance of the movie, I'm Not There, I'm 2logging about some of my favorite Dylan albums.

After 2logging about the first albums, I wanted to jump to the twilight of Dylan's career for his next album.  This album has been pretty much the only music in my iTunes playlist for the past year.

Modern Times, to youngsters like us, is a funny title.  The album reeks of antiquity. The album's musical tradition ranges from 1850 - 1950s America, including covers of Muddy Waters numbers, slave ballads, and [Confederate Poet Laureate] Timrod poems (some politicians are reliving the Vietnam War, meanwhile Dylan is reliving the Civil War).  The title shares its name with a Chaplin movie from over 70 years ago.  The cover photograph of a taxi is from 1947.  For some comparison of this timeframe, this means the album taken as the sum of its parts predates Barry Manilow's recent The Greatest Songs of the Fifties.

Yet the subject matter remains strikingly relevant towards modern life.  His take on When the Levee Breaks came just a year after Katrina.  Thunder on the Mountain references Alicia Keys and the music video for When the Deal Goes Down stars Scarlett Johannson, giving the album a whiff of contemporary beauty.  Most importantly, the themes of most of the songs are timeless and continually relevant; songs about working, loving, and dying.

It's very impressive that the album debuted at number one at Dylan's age (he is the oldest person to accomplish this feat).  Off the top of my head, the only artists who have proven themselves to have even greater longevity are the Isley Brothers, who have scored hot 100 singles in every decade.

Bob Dylan was accused of plagiarism for this album, which is a touch unfair.  Outside of an academic setting, plagiarism is only harmful when it is taking food out of a living human's mouth.  When Stephen Ambrose allegedly plagiarized, he had taken words from a contemporary historian, Thomas Childers, without properly attributing it.  Since Thomas Childers was still alive, the plagiarism was directly cutting in to his ability to make a living.  Since Dylan was taking melodies and words from people who had long since died, nobody was going to bed hungry.  In essence, his only crime is stirring up interest in artists whose ideas have stood the test of time and legally entered the public domain.  This is the definition of folk music, preserving memes and ideas over generations.  Nonetheless, I agree it would have been less douchey if Dylan had simply acknowledged it from the get-go, but that's just the douchebag side of Bob Dylan.

Other than the saccharine cruise ship dance medley "Beyond the Horizon", every song on the album is amazing.  My most notable picks:

• Rollin' and Tumblin': I've been obsessed with blues lately, Muddy Waters in particular.  Rollin' and Tumblin' is probably the greatest rock song of all time.  This is a lick that has been redone by some of the greatest musical virtuosos of history, Clapton, Beck, and Winters.  I predict that the lyrics and melody of Rollin' and Tumblin' will survive 500 years from now, in the form of a nursery rhyme or something.  Dylan adds some great lyrics.  I'm not sure how many are original Dylan, but I particularly love:
  • Ain't nothing more depressing than trying to satisfy this woman of mine
  • I've been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin' tombs
  • Some lazy slut has charmed away my brains
• Workingman's Blues #2: A song for anybody who's ever had a bad day at a soul-crushing job.  People everywhere have very different types of work.  At the end of the day, some workers find their feet hurting, some workers find their brain worn out, and some workers clean blood off their hands.  No matter how different people's jobs at work are, this song captures the complex feeling anybody has about toiling at a job they don't like.  All of us all form a community.  Worker all face a challenge of hating his or her crummy job, yet dependendin on it for sustenance.  It's strictly populist, class-warfare song: "Some people don't ever work a day in their life, don't know what work even means."  But more than that, it's a comforting lullaby to get you through a day of work.
• Nettie Moore: A masterpiece.  If you listen to this song and don't get misty-eyed, you may not have emotions.  It follows the tragic romance with a woman ("When you're around all my grief gives 'way/A lifetime with you is like a heavenly day") who gets sold into slavery ("No knife could ever cut our love apart").

An honorable mention to The Levee's Gonna Break, a song also remade by Zeppelin, which is a ridiculous pastiche of funny images.

If this were Dylan's last album, it would be a wonderful coda to his career, but I like to think he's got several more in him.

In advance of the movie, I'm Not There, I'm 2logging about some of my favorite Dylan albums.

Get ready, here comes reinvention the first.

"Hey guys... Dylan here.  I'm sorry I got all caught up in that anti-war stuff.  I'm still down with hippies, I just don't want to be on the front lines fighting to solve all the world's problems and stuff.  So is it OK if I just sort of help the caues by writing psychedelic, surrealist lyrics?  PS, have you heard about this whole electricity thing."

Dylan going electric alienated his folk fans in a big way, leading to occasional shouting matches between him and his audience.  In hindsight, we see that the style of his electric music has remained fairly constant over the past forty several decades.  It typically takes the form of a simple, ambient homage to a variety American musical styles, typically blues.  It's clear that Dylan had a very particular sound in mind, so going electric was necessary to make the music he desired.

In so many ways, this is a transitional album to the craziness of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde.  It's half electric, half acoustic.  It dips its toe into the weird end of the pool, but doesn't get completely wet.  However, unlike the next two albums, this album has an unimpeachable honesty to its lyrics.  Without Dylan's personality shining through so clearly, people would have no grounding for the entropy of the next two albums and probably would have rejected them outright.

The lyrics on this album are top shelf, so I invite them to speak for themselves: 

Maggie's Farm:
I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.
No, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.
Well, he puts his cigar
Out in your face just for kicks.
His bedroom window
It is made out of bricks.
The National Guard stands around his door.
Ah, I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.

She Belongs to Me:
She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black.
...
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks.
She's a hypnotist collector,
You are a walking antique.

Subterranean Homesick Blues:
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try "No Doz"
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

If this album isn't Dylan's best, it's probably in the top two. Every song on this album is phenomenal.  You get through track ten, and you think "Wow, that previous sixty minutes of music literally threw me flat on my back."  Good enough, right?  Pshaw!  You haven't even gotten to his 16 minute ballad Highlands.

For me, this album exists in liminal time.  The album has been out for ten years now.  I only started listening to Dylan some five years back.  Yet somehow it took me a few years to find out this album existed.  Its discovery was like a micro-revolution.  Most of Dylan's stuff is the remnant of ancient history.   Yet, so many decades of experience and growth later, and he's still releasing remarkably different poetry.  It's as if he's speaking to me simultaneously from both the past and the present.  Both voices have a place reserved for them in history, yet one is still growing and unfolding as we speak. It's like a three-way conversation, where none of the three parties can hear each other.

I tried to explain it to a former girlfriend of mine, and she just thought I was gay.

I don't know how I can only pick a few songs on this album to talk about.  I'll skip "Not Dark Yet", because I'm not obsessed with death, and pick three others:

• Love Sick: "I'm sick of love. But I'm in the thick of it.". This is the quintessential rallying cry of the lonely person. Or at least, a better slogan than Cher's "Song for the Lonely". Like moths to a flame, nobody can resist love. It aggravates us, humiliates us, and destroys us, yet we always return for another beating. Love and hate are not opposites, they are two sides of the same coin, and this song effortlessly captures this feeling.
• Can't Wait: Dylan tries to reconcile the confusing smorgasbord of feelings he has towards his longtime love in this seemingly futile song. I'm too young to have experienced the kind of love that comes from 65 years of life, but the snippets I can glean from this song capture the weariness and hopefulness of navigating love's ebbs and flows. Read the lyrics again and again, but if you're strapped for time, just enjoy this: "If I saw you coming, I don't know what I would do/I'd like to think I could control myself, but it isn't true/That's how it is when things disintegrate."
• Highlands: This song is impressive for more than its length. Back when I had an iPod and a Vespa, I used to turn this on after a long day's work and finish this eerie song by the time I got home. It's like one of his long, surrealist ballads of yore (think Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or Desolation Row), but slower and starring Dylan. He's basically just wandering around aimlessly, describing things that amuse him. And it somehow never gets old. The best parts is a three-to-four minute sequence where he casually flirts with a waitress. She tries to get him to draw a picture of him, and he coyly replies "I don't do sketches from memory." Towards the end, when he's at his most senile, he drops this sequence that makes me laugh out loud: "I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog/Talking to myself in a monologue/I think what I need might be a full length leather coat/Somebody just asked me If I registered to vote".

Finally saw the Dylan movie.  Thought it wonderful.  Like Arrested Development, it rewards you for knowing a lot, but it doesn't punish you if you're not up to speed on the minutia.  I think it only punishes you if you dislike surrealism, contradiction, or long movies.

If you haven't seen the movie, that's all you get to read.

***Spoiler Alert***

I wanted to write up a post to focus attention on the Richard Gere storyline.  The Gere storyline was not only the best sequence in the movie, but also the most crucial to the film's success.  I'm genuinely surprised that film critics have been so baffled by this storyline.  I never get complexity in movies, and even simplicity escapes me about half the time.  But this one seemed a simple allegory of Dylan's life.

In the style of Dylan and his movie, there's not a one-size-fits all explanation.  Rather, we use the various threads we can understand as guideposts to inform our thinking about the rest of the scene.  For example, the basics of Gere's character:

• His story comes last.  This is important.  The film opens with Dylan as a fictional kid, and closes with Dylan as Billy the Kid.  Tall tales meant to symbolize the legend of Dylan.  Opposite ages, but the story comes full circle.
• He declares himself not a musician.  What we're seeing is a metaphor for the non-musical side of Dylan.  His philosophy.
• Compared with the other 5-6 Dylans, his Dylan is the quietest.  His story is the sparsest.  I have to think it represents the most compact thesis Haynes makes about Dylan's life.

Taken as a simple metaphor for Dylan, what do we see?  Dylan is an outsider.  An outlaw.  He lives a quiet life on the outskirts of the town of Riddle, an appropriately named place for the enigmatic Dylan to reside.  Haynes is saying that, beneath all the talk, Dylan is just a quiet guy who likes his privacy.  All his artful dodging of interviewers throughout the rest of the movie is Dylan's way of keeping his privacy.  His freedom.

When he heads down to Riddle, the townsfolk embody a menagerie of weirdness: characters in strange costume, midgets, a giraffe.  It looks like Desolation Row.  This sequence explains the randomness of some of Dylan's songs.  Haynes is asserting that when Dylan starts writing seemingly weird lyrics, he's not being poetic or metaphorical or anything.  He's describing in the most straightforward way possible how he sees the world.  You get the fleeting sense of watching an old Dylan trapped in the strange world he concocted.

He gets to the town square.  While marching, he sees a family facing injustice.  He ignores it.  Dylan's not interested in fighting every fight. 

He soon finds himself facing off with the establishment.  He dons the mask of protester and becomes the voice of the townspeople.  When he sheds the mask-as-protester-facade, we see his interest in the townsfolk remains genuine.  The townsfolk, hearing his words, become motivated to rebellion.  The whole thing is a clear explanation of his position as anti-war icon.

He later escapes on a train.  At this point, the story comes full circle with the Dylan as young kid story.  Except this Dylan is going to look for some other place to hide.  The dog is a little confusing, but I think symbolizes the women Dylan loves in his life.  The dog is the overriding motivation for the entire scene.  Dylan only gets into the mess because he's chasing the dog.  The dog is his loyal companion he hopes will be his partner in crime for his entire life.  Unfortunately, like Dylan's women, it gets left behind as Dylan moves on to the next thing.

This storyline is the most important storyline in the movie.  Not just because it provides a compact read on Dylan.  Throughout the rest of the movie, most of the Dylans argue that a song cannot change anything.  That a song is ineffective.  That a song is useless.  This storyline makes a compelling argument that Dylan is wrong.  Songs can be powerful.  An idea can change a world.  That Dylan's work is important.

The blotted crow, the fat man through the clouds...the queen's head is a craggy sandcastle of towers.

But she's got raven's hair and a hood; she looks at us over the shoulder with rainbow eyes; she's got eyes of dervishes, lickshots, upturned palms...

You'd never have known if it was a phone or a guitar. And where are we now? The opal finger of blacksmoke is curling 'round the cup.

Dabne, Isis, Maggie, and Piano.

Leave the sheriff's men to search the river for the rest of it.