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Musicians:
Tony Brown - Bass
Buddy Cage - Steel Guitar
Paul Griffin - Organ
Eric Weissberg & Deliverance
In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined
to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America,
breeding in-a-compost of greed and uselessness and murder,
in those places where statesmen and generals stash the
bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood
of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for President promising
life and delivering death. The infected young men
machine-gunned babies in Asian ditches; they marshalled
metal death through the mighty clouds, up above God's
green earth, released it in silent streams, and moved on,
while the hospitals exploded and green fields were churned
to mud.
And here at home, something died. The bacillus moved among
us, slaying that old America where the immigrants lit a
million dreams in the shadows of the bridges, killing the
great brawling country of barnstormers and wobblies and
home-run hitters, the place of Betty Grable and Carl
Furillo and heavyweight champions of the world. And
through the fog of the plague, most art withered into
journalism. Painters lift the easel to scrawl their
innocence on walls and manifestos. Symphonies died on
crowded roads. Novels served as furnished rooms for
ideology.
And as the evidence piled up, as the rock was pushed back
to reveal the worms, many retreated into that past that
never was, the place of balcony dreams in Loew's Met, fair
women and honorable men, where we browned ourselves in the
Creamsicle summers, only faintly hearing the young men
march to the troopships, while Jo Stafford gladly promised
her fidelity. Poor America. Tossed on a pilgrim tide. Land
where the poets died.
Except for Dylan.
He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north
country, and remained true. He was not the only one, of
course; he is not the only one now. But of all the poets,
Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea
and put it in a glass.
Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told
us about the hard rain that was going to fall, and how it
would carry plague. In the teargas in 1968 Chicago, they
hurled Dylan at the walls of the great hotels, where the
infected drew the blinds, and their butlers ordered up the
bayonets. Most of them are gone now. Dylan remains.
So forget the clenched young scholars who analyze his
rhymes into dust. Remember that he gave us voice, When our
innocence died forever, Bob Dylan made that moment into
art. The wonder is that he survived.
That is no small thing. We live in the smoky landscape
now, as the exhausted troops seek the roads home. The
signposts have been smashed; the maps are blurred. There
is no politician anywhere who can move anyone to hope; the
plague recedes, but it is not dead, and the statesmen are
as irrelevant as the tarnished statues in the public
parks. We live with a callous on the heart. Only the
artists can remove it. Only the artists can help the poor
land again to feel.
And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this
album, he is as personal and as universal as Yeats or
Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous
opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the
music, the tones of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a
sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with sly humor, some
rage, and a sense of simple joy. They are the poems of a
survivor. The warning voice of the innocent boy is no
longer here, because Dylan has chosen not to remain a boy.
It is not his voice that has grown richer, stronger, more
certain; it is Dylan himself. And his poetry, his
troubadour's traveling art, seems to me to be more
meaningful than ever. I thought, listening to these songs,
of the words of Yeats, walker of the roads of Ireland:
"We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but
of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."
Dylan is now looking at the quarrel of the self. The
crowds have moved back off the stage of history; we are
left with the solitary human, a single hair on the skin of
the earth. Dylan speaks now for that single hair.
If you see her,
Say hello.
She might be in Tangiers...*
So begins one of these poems, as light as a slide on ice,
and as dangerous. Dylan doesn't fall in. Instead, he tells
us the essentials; a woman once lived, gone off, vanished
into the wild places of the earth, still loved.
If you're makin' love to her,
Kiss her for the kid.
Who always has respected her,
for doin' what she did...*
It is a simple love song, of course, which is the proper
territory of poets, but is about love filled with honor,
and a kind of dignity, the generosity that so few people
can summon when another has become a parenthesis in a
life. That song, and some of the other love poems in this
collection, seem to me absolutely right, in this moment at
the end of wars, as all of us, old, young, middle-aged,
men and women, are searching for some simple things to
believe in. Dylan here tips his hat to Rimbaud and
Verlaine, knowing all about the seasons in hell, but he
insists on his right to speak of love, that human emotion
that still exists, in Faulkner's phrase, in spite of, not
because.
And yes, there is humor here too, a small grin pasted over
the hurt, delivered almost casually, as if the poet could
control the chaos of feeling with a few simply chosen
words:
Life is sad
Life is a bust.
All ya can do.
Is do what you must.
You do what you must do,
And ya do it will.
I'll do it for you,
Ah, honey baby, can't ya tell?**
A simple song. Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to
be. But a song which conjures up the American road, all
the busted dreams of open places, boxcars, the Big Dipper
pricking the velvet night. And it made me think of
Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all,
Kerouac, racing Deam Mariarty across the country in the
Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on
the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading
back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the
railroad earth. Music drove them; they always knew they
were near New York when they picked up Symphony Sid on the
radio. In San Francisco they declared a Renaissance and
read poetry to jazz, trying to make Mallarme's dream
flourish in the soil of America. They failed, as artist
generally do, but in some ways Dylan has kept their
promise.
Now he has moved past them, driving harder into self.
Listen to "Idiot Wind." It is a hard,
cold-blooded poem about the survivor's anger, as personal
as anything ever committed to a record. And yet is can
also stand as the anthem for all who feel invaded,
handled, bottled, packaged; all who spent themselves in
combat with the plague; all who ever walked into the
knives of humiliation or hatred. The idiot wind
trivialized lives into gossip, celebrates fad and fashion,
glorifies the dismal glitter of celebrity. Its products
live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, if
the poisoned air and dead grey lakes. But most of all, it
blows through the human heart. Dylan knows that such a
wind is the deadliest enemy of art. And when the artists
die, we all die with them.
Or listen to the long narrative poem called "Lily,
Rosemary And The Jack of Hearts." It should not be
reduced to notes, or taken out of context; it should be
experienced in full. The compression of story is
masterful, but its real wonder is in the spaces, in what
the artist left out of his painting. To me, that has
always been the key to Dylan's art. To state things
plainly is the function of journalism; but Dylan sings a
more fugitive song: allusive, symbolic, full of imagery
and ellipses, and by leaving things out, he allows us the
grand privilege of creating along with him. His song
becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we
listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we
expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most
democratic form of creation.
Totalitarian art tells us what to feel. Dylan's art feels,
and invites us to join him.
That quality is in all the work in this collection, the
long, major works, the casual drawings and etchings. There
are some who attack Dylan because he will not rewrite
"Like a Rolling Stone" or "Gates of
Eden." They are fools because they are cheating
themselves of a shot at wonder. Every artist owns a vision
of the world, and he shouts his protest when he sees evil
mangling that vision. But he must also tell us the vision.
Now we are getting Dylan's vision, rich and loamy, against
which the world moved so darkly. To enter that envisioned
world, is like plunging deep into a mountain pool, where
the rocks are clear and smooth at the bottom.
So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the
mongers of the idiot wind. Don't mistake him for Isaiah,
or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies. He is
only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of
Provence, and he has survived the plague. Look: he has
just walked into the courtyard, padding across the
flagstones, strumming a guitar. The words are about
"flowers on the hillside bloomin' crazy/Crickets
talkin' back and forth in rhyme..." A girl,
red-haired and melancholy, begins to smile. Listen: the
poet sings to all of us:
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass,
In the ones I love.
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go.***
- Pete Hamill, New York, 1974
Cover Photo - Paul Till
Back Cover Illustration - David Oppenheim
Art Direction - Ron Coro
*from "If You See Her, Say Hello," ©1974 Ram's
Horn Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.
**from "Buckets of Rain," ©1974 Ram's Horn
Music. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.
***from "You're Gonna Make Me Lonseome When You
Go," ©1974 Ram's Horn Music. Used by Permission. All
rights reserved.
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