Click on the headline to link to a YouTube film clip of Bob Dylan performing Mississippi from his Love and Theft album.
CD Review
Tempest, Bob Dylan, Columbia Records, 2012
It is hard to believe that I have been listening to Brother Dylan now for fifty years, some good, some bad, some fat some lean, the years that is, just like the lyrics in this 35th studio album. As usual, especially of late, he either soars with the lyrical angels or is down in wordsmith skid row with the rest of us. Also as usual of late, at least since World Gone Wrong, some of the material as befits the times is dark, dark as the night with no apparent light at the end of that night. More on this below.
Getting back to the difference in listening to Dylan then and now though. In the old days I had to sneak up into my room and listen to his stuff on a local folk music program on my transistor radio (for the younger set that was a small battery- operated radio we could use to listen to rock and roll and other parent- disapproved music without them knowing it. Sorry, no up or down loading, you just took what you could get and on some nights, usually Sunday, you could get Moon Odom’s Blues Hour out of Chicago and be in seventh heaven). Why was I forced into exile? My parents blew their collective tops when I played Dylan’s raspy-voiced Blowin’ In The Wind for the 217th straight time on the family record player. See they objected not so much to the lyrics (although they, thankfully, probably didn’t understand them) as to that damn voice, especially compared to their generation’s Frank Sinatra or the Inkspots let’s say.
Well, Brother Dylan’s voice if it was raspy then is more like cracked glass now. But did (does) anybody listen to his stuff for the voice (or the melody). Hell, no, or at least I hope it is hell no, it has always been about the lyrics, about some theme that interested him at any particular point and that is the case here with Tempest. Bob Dylan could have been the president of the generation of’’68, my generation, but after the first fanfare as the voice of that generation he chose to move on and re-invent himself as what has now become an ageless (and endlessly touring) troubadour, something out of the old medieval tradition.
And so we have had, and have here, ballad offerings (Tempest, a.k.a. Captain Ahab meets the Titanic), musings, prose poems, muttering of an old sometimes wise man (Long and Wasted Years), perfectly meshed lyrics (Soon After Midnight), songs of love, thwarted love, love gone bad, love with regret and no regrets, murmuring of dark times here and now and to come , a nod to fallen comrades (Roll On John), and just plain old fashioned Dylan whimsy.
Does that sound familiar? Well, it should it because it is the “formula” Dylan has been using at least since Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited (is there any darker song here than Desolation Row by the way). And in the end that is why you should listen to this album. While we all know, and have had it pounded into our heads almost daily, this is no country for old men (or old women either) note this, and note it well, you need to listen to this old man in order to know what it was like in the times when men and women wrote meaningful and worthy lyrics for keeps even when sung with cracked glass voices. Enough said
