Read Ben Greenman’s review of “Tempest” in the magazine.
The first song on Bob Dylan’s new album, “Tempest,” is about a steam-train whistle “blowing like she’s never blowed before,” but the sound that grabs your ears is lower-frequency, and more fearsome. It’s Dylan himself, whose voice today shares certain tonal qualities with Tom Waits’s, and certain others with sputtering lawn-mower engines. Dylan has never been a soothing singer; the closest he came was on “Nashville Skyline,” in 1969, when he quit smoking and his nasal bark transformed, briefly, magically, into a croon. But even by Dylan’s standards, the vocal cragginess of “Tempest” is startling. On that opening song, “Duquesne Whistle,” his voice is thrown into relief by gentle music, a loping Western swing tune, pushed down in the mix so it sounds at times like Dylan is braying over an old 78 r.p.m. phonograph record. “Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing / Blowing like the sky is gonna blow apart,” he rumbles. Forget the sky—it’s my subwoofers I’m worried about.
You could ascribe Dylan’s croak to the ravages of time. (He is seventy-one.) You might more accurately call it a stylistic flourish—a ravages-of-time shtick. The rock-star survivors of Dylan’s generation have all had to find ways to deal with their advancing age. We have become used to the spectacle of old men, hair-plugged and botoxed and crammed into tight trousers, recycling the hits of their youth on blockbuster reunion tours. But Dylan doesn’t run from his old age—he accentuates it. Over the past decade-and-a-half, he’s revitalized his career, releasing a string of records that look back, way back, past the supercharged rock of his great mid-sixties albums, to take in not just the roots music that has always nourished his songs—folk and gospel and blues and country—but the sounds of the pre-rock hit parade: Victorian parlor ballads, Tin Pan Alley ragtime, a note-for-note rewrite of the thirties radio staple “Red Sails in the Sunset,” and, on his mischievous 2009 album “Christmas in the Heart,” chirrupy, syrupy yuletide pop. He’s freshened up his music by playing the old coot.
Dylan’s lyrics, meanwhile, are more marinated in history than they’ve ever been, more swollen with old-timey allusions and borrowings and fair-use thefts. On the new album, he sings about the War of 1812, the wreck of the Titanic, and the murder of John Lennon. He invokes the Gospel of Matthew, “The Faerie Queen,” and William Blake’s “The Tyger”; he lifts lyrics from the folk standards “Barbara Allen” and “Gypsy Davy,” from the nineteen-twenties hit “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas,” and from “Twist and Shout”; he quotes from three Beatles’ songs. In “Scarlet Town,” the album’s most desolate ballad, Dylan pulls off a trifecta—cribbing from country singer Vern Gosdin’s 1988 hit “Set ‘Em Up Joe,” which itself tipped a Stetson to Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You” and winked at Sinatra’s saloon-song classic “One for My Baby (And One for the Road).” (Dylan’s couplet is one that Gosdin, Tubb, and Sinatra would never have sung: “Set ’em up, Joe, and play ‘Walking the Floor’ / Play it for my flat-chested junkie whore.”) On “Tempest,” as on his last several releases, Dylan isn’t a folkie, he’s a folklorist, the keeper of American musical memory. If he sauces up his vocals with a little extra wheeze and rasp—well, what do think the Voice of Experience sounds like?
“Tempest” isn’t as revelatory as “Love and Theft,” from 2001, or “Modern Times,” from 2006, the benchmarks of Dylan’s late period. But it’s as spirited and vigorous an album as he’s made. It’s his longest one, clocking in at sixty-eight-minutes-plus; the title track, the song about the Titanic, is a Celtic-tinged waltz that runs nearly fourteen minutes and has forty-five verses. “Tempest” may also be Dylan’s randiest record; like his namesake Dylan Thomas, Bob is not going gently. “I’m not dead yet / My bells still rings,” he sings over the Bo Diddley stomp of “Early Roman Kings,” a song packed with hair-raising boasts: “I’ll dress up your wounds / With a blood-clotted rag / I ain’t afraid to make love / If you a bitch or a hag.” The younger Dylan was coy about sex, wrapping his come-ons in surreal wordplay or, when so inclined, playing the courtly gent. (“Shut the light, shut the shade / You don’t have to be afraid.”) Today, he minces no words:
For Dylan, the little death leads, inevitably, to thoughts of the big kind. A half-century ago, the twenty-year-old Bob Dylan released a début album full of death-haunted blues and folk ballads (“In My Time of Dyin,” “Fixin’ to Die,” “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”). Dylan is still obsessed with mortality, but on “Tempest” his treatment of the subject is closer to a grindhouse movie director’s than a bluesman’s. The body count on the album includes the sixteen-hundred doomed Titanic passengers, the lovers in “Tin Angel” who meet their end in a triple murder-suicide, and dozens of others. Dylan does not skimp on the details, audibly relishing a litany of drownings, stabbings, coursing blood, desecrated corpses, “broken backs and broken necks,” brains “burned out” by the sun, bodies torn limb from limb by dogs, etc. “I came to bury / Not to praise,” Dylan sings in “Pay in Blood.” It’s a mission statement, not a quip.
If Dylan wasn’t Dylan—if he was, say, Quentin Tarantino or a gangsta rapper—he might find himself under attack for aestheticizing violence in these gruesome, stubbornly amoral, beautifully written songs. Not all of them fall into that category, of course. “Tempest,” the title track, finds valor alongside treachery and senseless death, and the album’s curtain-closer, the stately Lennon elegy “Roll On, John,” concludes with a benediction that movingly paraphrases Blake: “In the forest of the night / Cover him up and let him sleep.” In Rolling Stone, the critic Will Hermes writes that “Roll On, John” “throbs with survivor’s guilt.” I had similar thoughts listening to the song: isn’t Dylan, eulogizing his kindred spirit and onetime friendly rival, really singing about himself, telegraphing his own anxieties about art, fame, and immortality? Couldn’t we just as well call the song “Roll On, Bob”?
Perhaps. The hunt for Dylan in Dylan songs is a mug’s game. Dylan is a genius; he’s also the greatest bullshitter and jive-talker in popular-music history. He began laying boobytraps for his exegetes before he even had any, and they—we—have never stopped taking the bait. Today Dylanology is a midrashic enterprise rivaling Talmudism and Shakespeare Studies, and it’s worth remembering its origins: it started with the hippie gadfly A .J. Weberman, who took to “reading” toothbrushes recovered from garbage bins outside of Dylan’s MacDougal Street townhouse. (“‘Tooth’ means ‘electric guitar’ in D’s symbology….”) There’s been some fantastic writing about Dylan’s music over the years, but when it comes to Dylan himself, we haven’t gotten much further than the toothbrushes. “Tempest” won’t help the cause. It merely piles more masks on the face of a sphinx.
The original Dylanological sin is to focus too much on the words, and too little on the sound: to treat Dylan like he’s a poet, a writer of verse, when of course he’s a musician—a songwriter and, supremely, a singer. “Tempest” reminds us what a thrilling and eccentric vocalist he is. He sings with a jazzman’s feel for rhythmic play, laying back behind the beat, rushing ahead of it, bending, distending, and cutting short his raggedy notes. He has dramatic flair that places him in the company of Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and George Jones: an actor’s way with line readings, a knack for making the musical conversational and vice versa. You can hear it in “Soon After Midnight,” a doo-wop-flavored love ballad, where he drops into dulcet coo to threaten a rival lover: “Two-Timing Slim / Who’s ever heard of him? / I’ll drag his corpse through the mud.” Then there’s “Long and Wasted Years,” which finds Dylan talk-singing, in a drawling, taunting tone, over a cascading guitar line: “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes / There’s secrets in them that I can’t disguise / Come back, baby / Have I hurt your feelings? / I apologize.” Dylan may mean every word of that lyric; every word might be jive. Either way, unreliable narration has rarely sounded so good.
Illustration by Andy Friedman.
