I
Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind
By
Sam Lowell
Recently
I did a review of Bob Dylan’s CD, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the
king of Tin Pan Alley Frank Sinatra. (No, not as part of the never-ending and
getting weird for material bootleg series which I believe is up to volume
thirteen or some such number with outtakes and such overriding any real music
certainly nothing that hasn’t been done better on the long list of classic
album CDs like Blonde on Blonde, Highway
61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home) I noted that such an effort was
bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Strange as it may seem to a
generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who
came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others
to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got
them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put
out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in
many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley,
Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins’ and so on. That proposition though
seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute
of the early 1960s when he with Blowin’ In
The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, whether he wanted that designation
or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us
felt coming through the land.
What
Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an
entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his
feelings for his songs. Just like Frank when he was in high tide. What Dylan
has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the
American songbook (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back with him doing Hank Williams’ Lost
Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes with everything for
Williams to Johnny Cash to some old stuff he must have heard coming up in growing
up Hibbing, Minnesota). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music
from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers
and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big
tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own
songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now his hero is
Frank Sinatra as well.
I
may long for the old protest songs, the songs from the album pictured above,
you know Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that,
the roots music and not just Woody but Hank, Tex-Mex, the Carters, the odd and
unusual like Desolation Row or his cover of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow
Night but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for
the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard Dylan
live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (it
was always about the lyrics not the voice although by comparison that young
voice seems not to bad if not always on key) I do wonder though how much
production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly
as the “Chairman of the boards.” What goes around comes around.
