I'm enjoying the opportunity to do some reading on my post-Christmas break. I've read Michel Faber's brilliant The Fire Gospels and am now well into Bruce Cockburn's fascinating memoir Rumours of Glory.
Cockburn's trajectory as an artist is almost the opposite, although they share many preoccupations, to that of Bob Dylan; as Cockburn begins as a nature mystic before catching the intoxicating poetry of the urban and political.
He writes:
'My songs tend to be triggered by whatever is in front of me, filtered through feeling and imagination. I went looking for humanity in all its guises. I wrote about what I found: the love, the meanness, the artists, the farmers, the juntas; the books, the slums, the palaces; the conflicts, the peace, the music. That's why I don't think of the things I write as "protest" songs. They reflect what I see and how I feel about it. The songs are not ideologically driven. They are meant not as calls to action - though if someone heard one of my songs and was inspired to help the poor or save an ecosystem, all the better - but as an attempt to share my personal response to experience with anyone who feels a resonance, or even someone who doesn't, because life is one long conversation.'
'As a songwriter newly attuned to political subject matter,' he writes that he began to question his 'unexamined notion that art must remain "pure," untainted by the political ... I began to understand that if an artist's job is to distil the human experience into something that can be shared, then the political, as much a part of that experience as God or sex or alienation, deserved to be seen as raw material. The arts contribute significantly to social movements and cultural cohesion.'
Interestingly, Cockburn rates In the Falling Dark, The Charity of Night and Breakfast in New Orleans Dinner in Timbuktu as the records with which he is most satisfied. For me, he really hits his stride with Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws (the masterpiece of his nature mysticism) and Humans (which begins his series of insights into the urban and politics). Stealing Fire and World of Wonders showcase his hard-hitting and informed political reflections, while Nothing but a Burning Light and You've never seen Everything wonderfully merge his earlier and later preoccupations.
Cockburn was dealing with spiritual themes at a time in rock and folk when such things were not fashionable or widely recognised within the work of several of the most significant artists of the day. Lou Adler, who 'dreamed up [for Dylan's Gospel by the Brothers and Sisters) the concept of matching the words and music of Bob Dylan with the majestic, booming voices he had heard in the recording studios - the vocals of the singers who came from the Baptist churches of South Los Angeles to belt out back-up for the big names,' was one of those able to see the spirituality in the songs of Bob Dylan:
'Listening to a lot of his songs, I felt there was a gospel feel to them, both spiritually and lyrically ... I think you can find something spiritual about all of Dylan's lyrics. Certainly something that goes beyond just being a pop song.'
Merry Clayton says, of recording the album, 'We took it to the church. That's how we approached it. Just like we were singing in our choir in our church.' The results, as Jessica Hundley has written, 'are wonderfully cathartic.' 'This is Dylan elevated into a sound huge and shimmering and rich - a chorus of voices lifting up his poetry ... into something close to scripture.'
That was 1969, when the Brothers and Sisters recorded a representative retrospective of Dylan's work from The Times They Are A-Changin' to Nashville Skyline by way of Another Side of Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde, The Basement Tapes and John Wesley Harding. There are many other Dylan tracks from the same period which could be given similar treatment including 'Blowin' In The Wind,' 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall,' 'When The Ship Comes In,' 'All I Really Want To Do,' 'Sign On The Cross' and 'I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine,' among many others.
Sid Griffin, writing on 'The Importance of The Basement Tapes,' describes in Biblical terms how the 'beat poetics' of Dylan's political and urban songs 'morphed into whimsy or Biblical-like prophecies'; 'songs derived from old sea shanties, melodic reflections about life's absudities, hard-rockin' and often hilarious fictitious character sketches, musical tributes to past heroes which bordered on pastiche, musical pastiches so authentic they bordered on being tributes, devout spirituals, C&W laments, a new take on blues balladry, and, yes, love in all its guises':
'A year earlier [1966] the singer had been in the middle of an exhausting World Tour ... And then, during a break in the touring, the singer saw a light as bright as Saul witnessed on the road to Damascus when he fell to the ground blinded. Bob Dylan, also temporarily blinded, fell to the ground from a motorcycle and when he healed he had changed his thinking almost as dramatically as Saul did. He too sought a new peace in his life for he'd found a direction home ...
Bob Dylan would now place a new emphasis on family, on his new home and its immediate community, on his personal spirit, and would view Mammon with even greater suspicion that he did before.'
Griffin notes that 'when you look at the song titles on an "Americana" chart in any trade magazine today you are seeing the Basement Tapes' musical grandchildren.'
In 1966 Dylan described the range of music and imagery which he has tapped since: 'Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy.'
He has stated clearly that: 'Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil.'
More reflections on the work of Cockburn and Dylan can be found in my co-authored book The Secret Chord.
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Bruce Cockburn - Open.
Showing posts with label h. williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label h. williams. Show all posts
Sunday, 28 December 2014
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
Babel - the sound of transcendent music
Second albums are tricky affairs and, despite three years of preparation, Mumford and Sons' Babel is no exception.
One issue is that what surprised on the first album is now familiar territory when it comes to the second. Hence, in part, the plethora of comments in reviews that Babel is Sigh No More part II. That is only partly the case. Negatively, there is no equivalent surprise on Babel to the shock of Sigh No More's opening lines, 'Serve God, love me and mend ...' which set up the then unfashionable combination of driven folk strumming with spiritual insight which characterised that album. Babel retains the use of religious language but has less to offer in the way of those insightful aphorisms, couplets and verses which leapt out of so many of the songs on Sigh No More. This, combined with its relentlessly first person narratives, means that Babel, although consistently using the imagery of darkness and light, has less contrast, less light and shade, than Sigh No More.
Babel is generally a darker album with its repeated themes of leaving, loss and wandering set primarily in first person strained romances. That is not the full picture however as several of the songs seem both more powerful and more logical as addresses to God rather than a human lover. I'm thinking here particularly of 'Hopeless Wanderer' - a prayer for constancy having found the right road - and 'Below My Feet' - a prayer for ongoing learning and service having received the message from Jesus that all is well.
The darkness, loss and wandering that suffuse Babel is then fused with the transcendent sound and anthemic choruses that Mumford and Sons conjure up with banjo, double bass, guitar, keyboards and vocals. In this way the songs, despite their content, provide Mumford Moments - what the Urban Dictionary describes as moments when you become really engrossed with and entranced by the transcendent music of Mumford and Sons bringing on a feeling of euphoria or spirituality. The essence of Mumford and Sons' sound and success is this sense of transcendence which they create The restlessness of which they write is the precursor to the search for participation in something greater than they know. That is transcendence and their euphoric music achieves this even when the words they sing focus more on restlessness than rising. The religious language they use and the spiritual insights they bring serve to ground this transcendent sound in the search for something more so that their songs are not simply motivational or exhortatory but instead sound and sense are one and the same.
Written Pre-Mumfords, these words from Bill Friskics-Warren in his book I'll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence are nevertheless relevant:
'Records that articulate an urge for transcendence, and a great number of them do, are not pegged as easily as the bins of retailers might suggest. Less the domains of genres like rock, soul, and rap, they might more appropriately be termed "transcendental music" - music that, regardless of stylistic signature or marketing niche, points beyond itself, urging listeners to look past the mundane and to see themselves and their striving in a new light. Those who make transcendental music understand how this works only too well. They typically have had their worlds opened up in much the same way. Johnny Cash, who struggled, as he sang, to "subdue the beast within," was drawn to the existential conflict in the songs of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, just as Dylan and Kristofferson were enthralled by the work of the Beat Poets and the French symbolists before them. Al Green, a soul singer who eventually became a preacher, identified with the spiritual desolation of Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Polly Harvey, a post-punk, art-school dropout from rural England, sought cathartic renewal in the blues, much as her Irish counterpart Van Morrison first did some thirty years before her.
Records of a transcendental bent, those made by people trying to get higher - and often, to take us there as well - are not peripheral to the history of popular music; they lie at the heart of it. The restlessness that they express often speaks to people as profoundly as what they hear in church or at their mosque or synagogue - more profoundly at times, especially lately, as many wrestle with questions of providence in our seemingly more volatile world. Countless people in the United States, for example, looked to Bruce Springsteen and his album The Rising for comfort and insight after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. In today's post-Christian milieu - a world defined increasingly by multiculturalism and globalization - pop music frequently serves as a substitute for conventional religious observance, or at least provides spiritual clarity and guidance where it might be lacking. Pop music has for decades possessed the power, much as liturgies and sacred music have for centuries, to transport the human spirit and serve as a vehicle for the transcendence we seek.'
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Mumford and Sons - Below My Feet.
One issue is that what surprised on the first album is now familiar territory when it comes to the second. Hence, in part, the plethora of comments in reviews that Babel is Sigh No More part II. That is only partly the case. Negatively, there is no equivalent surprise on Babel to the shock of Sigh No More's opening lines, 'Serve God, love me and mend ...' which set up the then unfashionable combination of driven folk strumming with spiritual insight which characterised that album. Babel retains the use of religious language but has less to offer in the way of those insightful aphorisms, couplets and verses which leapt out of so many of the songs on Sigh No More. This, combined with its relentlessly first person narratives, means that Babel, although consistently using the imagery of darkness and light, has less contrast, less light and shade, than Sigh No More.
Babel is generally a darker album with its repeated themes of leaving, loss and wandering set primarily in first person strained romances. That is not the full picture however as several of the songs seem both more powerful and more logical as addresses to God rather than a human lover. I'm thinking here particularly of 'Hopeless Wanderer' - a prayer for constancy having found the right road - and 'Below My Feet' - a prayer for ongoing learning and service having received the message from Jesus that all is well.
The darkness, loss and wandering that suffuse Babel is then fused with the transcendent sound and anthemic choruses that Mumford and Sons conjure up with banjo, double bass, guitar, keyboards and vocals. In this way the songs, despite their content, provide Mumford Moments - what the Urban Dictionary describes as moments when you become really engrossed with and entranced by the transcendent music of Mumford and Sons bringing on a feeling of euphoria or spirituality. The essence of Mumford and Sons' sound and success is this sense of transcendence which they create The restlessness of which they write is the precursor to the search for participation in something greater than they know. That is transcendence and their euphoric music achieves this even when the words they sing focus more on restlessness than rising. The religious language they use and the spiritual insights they bring serve to ground this transcendent sound in the search for something more so that their songs are not simply motivational or exhortatory but instead sound and sense are one and the same.
Written Pre-Mumfords, these words from Bill Friskics-Warren in his book I'll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence are nevertheless relevant:
'Records that articulate an urge for transcendence, and a great number of them do, are not pegged as easily as the bins of retailers might suggest. Less the domains of genres like rock, soul, and rap, they might more appropriately be termed "transcendental music" - music that, regardless of stylistic signature or marketing niche, points beyond itself, urging listeners to look past the mundane and to see themselves and their striving in a new light. Those who make transcendental music understand how this works only too well. They typically have had their worlds opened up in much the same way. Johnny Cash, who struggled, as he sang, to "subdue the beast within," was drawn to the existential conflict in the songs of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, just as Dylan and Kristofferson were enthralled by the work of the Beat Poets and the French symbolists before them. Al Green, a soul singer who eventually became a preacher, identified with the spiritual desolation of Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Polly Harvey, a post-punk, art-school dropout from rural England, sought cathartic renewal in the blues, much as her Irish counterpart Van Morrison first did some thirty years before her.
Records of a transcendental bent, those made by people trying to get higher - and often, to take us there as well - are not peripheral to the history of popular music; they lie at the heart of it. The restlessness that they express often speaks to people as profoundly as what they hear in church or at their mosque or synagogue - more profoundly at times, especially lately, as many wrestle with questions of providence in our seemingly more volatile world. Countless people in the United States, for example, looked to Bruce Springsteen and his album The Rising for comfort and insight after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. In today's post-Christian milieu - a world defined increasingly by multiculturalism and globalization - pop music frequently serves as a substitute for conventional religious observance, or at least provides spiritual clarity and guidance where it might be lacking. Pop music has for decades possessed the power, much as liturgies and sacred music have for centuries, to transport the human spirit and serve as a vehicle for the transcendence we seek.'
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Mumford and Sons - Below My Feet.
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Bob Dylan: Pilgrim, Dante and Rimbaud
How many roads must a man walk down/Before you call him a man?" was the first of the questions that Bob Dylan posed in 'Blowin' in the Wind'. He didn't know the answer then - it was blowin' in the wind - and he still doesn't - because, for example, in the opening track of Time Out Of Mind, his end of millennium offering, he's still walkin':
"I'm walkin', through streets that are dead
Walkin', walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired,
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping." ('Love Sick').
Dylan comes from the tradition of hobo singers (Woody Guthrie) and beat poets (Jack Kerouac) for whom the journey and the documenting of their experience is life itself. When we first meet him singing in his original voice, on Bob Dylan, he's "ramblin' outa the wild West,/Leavin' the towns I love the best ... ''Til I come into New York town" ('Talkin' New York'). At this stage the ramblin', gamblin' hobo is a conscious image worn in homage to Woody Guthrie:
"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seeing your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song ...". ('Song to Woody')
Though he starts out on his journey in imitation of others what he sees on his journey is original, surreal and unjust:
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..." ('A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall')
Ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to go back out and walk in the shadow of the storm:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
He travels the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair ('Ballad of Hollis Brown'); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" ('Chimes of Freedom'); surveys 'Desolation Road'; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl ('All Along the Watchtower'); takes shelter from a woman "With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" ('Shelter from the Storm'); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry ('Idiot Wind'); finds a pathway to the stars and can't believe he's survived and is still alive ('Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat'); rides the slow train up around the bend ('Slow Train'); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief ('I Believe in You'); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path ('Every Grain of Sand'); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire ('Caribbean Wind'); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love ('Tight Connection to My Heart'); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:
"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven').
Modern Times is an album that is also drenched in the imagery of journeying: "Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down/Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king". Dylan as journeyman, as traveller, is the key insight of the liner notes for Tell Tale Signs where Larry Sloman signs off with a paragraph quoting a myriad of Dylan's lyrics:
"He ain't talking, but he's still walking, heart burning, still yearning. He's trampling through the mud, through the blistering sun, getting damp from the misty rain. He's got his top hat on, ambling along with his cane, stopping to watch all the young men and young women in their bright-coloured clothes cavorting in the park. Despite all the grief and devastation he's seen on his odyssey, his heart isn't weary, it's light and free, bursting all over with affection for all those who sailed with him. Deep down he knows that his loyal and much-loved companions approve of him and share his code. And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey."
In many ways, this stream of inspiration has involved reworking and rearticulating the classic Dylan song, 'Blind Willie McTell', that was left off Infidels. Predominantly blues-based and extending the blues/folk metaphor of the drifter, Together Through Life finds Dylan's characters rambling through apocalyptic landscapes, experiencing life's hardness, grasping and eulogising love with a wry and sardonic irony wherever they can find it before the change that death will bring.
Dylan has said that:
"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil."
This is also the picture of traditional American music conjured up by Bob Dylan in 1966: "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy."
Greil Marcus has pointed out that this 'traditional music' - the ancient ballads of mountain music, songs like Buell Kazee's 'East Virginia', Clarence Ashley's 'Coo Coo Bird' or Dock Boggs' 'Country Blues' - are what Dylan and the Band tapped into when recording The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band, music which Marcus describes as a "kaleidoscope of American music". "The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music"", says Marcus, "is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back."
Biblical imagery and apocalyptic frameworks have been a constant within Dylan's work as throughout his career he has written songs that depict the apathy of humanity in the face of the coming apocalypse. What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
From Slow Train Coming onwards he equated the apocalypse with the imminent return of Christ. The return of Christ in judgement is the slow train that is "comin' up around the bend" and in the face of this apocalypse he calls on human beings to wake up and strengthen the things that remain. Similarly, in 'The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar', he sees the apocalypse coming ("Curtain risin' on a new age") but not yet here while the Groom (Christ who awaits his bride, the Church) is still waiting at the altar. In the time that remains he again calls on human beings to arise from our slumber: "Dead man, dead man / When will you arise? / Cobwebs in your mind / Dust upon your eyes" ('Dead Man, Dead Man').
In the light of this thread in Dylan's songs throughout this period, it seems to me to be consistent to read 'Jokerman', from Infidels as another song in this vein; as a song depicting the apathy of humanity in the face of the apocalypse and one which is shot through with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the Book of Revelation. We are the jokermen who laugh, dance and fly but only in the dark of the night (equated with sin and judgement) afraid to come into the revealing light of the Sun/Son.
Jokerman, though, is a greater song that any of those mentioned previously because its depiction of humanity is more nuanced. There is much that is negative: we are born with a snake in both our fists; we rush in where angels fear to tread; our future is full of dread; we are doing no more that keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within; we are going to Sodom and Gomorrah only knowing the law of the jungle (the law of revenge from the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy - 'an eye for an eye'). But these negatives are not the whole story as we also experience freedom, dance to the nightingale tune, fly high, walk on the clouds, and are a friend to the martyr. We have an inherent dignity and beauty to which only the greatest of artists such as Michelangelo can do justice. In Jokerman Dylan captures well the Biblical portrait of humanity as made in the image of God but marred by our rejection of God with our potential for beauty and compassion perverted into a selfish search for self-aggrandisement.
The final verse comes straight from the Book of Revelation and describes the birth of the AntiChrist who will deceive humanity into following him rather than Christ. The accusation and challenge that Dylan puts to us in the final lines of this final verse is that we know exactly what is happening (after all, it has all been prophesied in the Book of Revelation) but we make no response; we are apathetic in the face of the apocalypse. Our lack of response is what is fatal to us because it is only through repentance and turning to Christ that we will be saved from the coming judgement. These final lines are both an accusation and a challenge because, in line with the prophecy of Revelation, Dylan clearly believes that humanity as a whole will be apathetic and non-responsive but they must also be a challenge because, if there is no possibility that any of us will respond, why write the song at all!
In 'Sweetheart Like You', also from Infidels, we see the possibility of response through a wonderfully contemporary depiction of Christ's incarnation. The song is written from the perspective of a misogynist male employee in an all-male workplace that is literally a hell of a place in which to work. To be in here requires the doing of some evil deed, having your own harem, playing till your lips bleed. There's only one step down from here and that's the ironically named "land of permanent bliss."
Into this perverted and prejudiced environment comes a woman, the sweetheart of the song's title. She is a Christ figure; a sinless figure entering into a world of sin and experiencing abuse and betrayal (is "that first kiss" a Judas kiss?) from those she encounters and to whom she holds out the possibility of a different kind of existence. Dylan makes his equation of the woman with Christ explicit by quoting directly from Jesus: "They say in your father's house, there's many mansions" (John 14: 2).
The song's narrator is confused and challenged by her appearance. He wants to dismiss her out of hand and back to his stereotypical role for her - "You know, a woman like you should be at home / That's where you belong / Watching out for someone who loves you true / Who would never do you wrong" - but he can't simply dismiss her as she is really there in front of him and so he begins to wonder, "What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?" All the time he asks that question there is the possibility that he may respond to her presence without abuse or dismissal.
In 'I and I' Dylan gives an honest depiction of the difficulties of response (based no doubt on his own inability to keep the moral standards that he seems to have perceived God to have expected of him and which, no doubt, his church at the time expected of him). The central character in this song has taken the untrodden path where the swift don't win the race (Matthew 7: 13 & 14 - "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."). He has looked into justice's beautiful face and yet as we meet him we discover that he has just slept with a strange woman (i.e. he has had sex outside of marriage).
In creation, Dylan sings, we neither honour nor forgive. Instead we take; our nature is the survival of the fittest. When we encounter God, our sinful, selfish human nature encounters the demand for pure perfection - "no man sees my face and lives." 'I and I' is about the difficulty of living between these two poles; of having started out on the untrodden path but then having slipped back. The song is an evocation of the guilt that the protagonist feels; a guilt that forces him to leave the woman, to go out for a walk into the narrow lanes, pushing himself along the darkest part of the road to get himself back on track and then hearing the accepting, forgiving words of Christ in his heart, "I made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot."
'I and I' is again set in the context of the apocalypse: "the world could come to an end tonight." The protagonist is responding in the face of the apocalypse. Even though he has sinned he is leaving that sin behind, pushing himself along the road and listening to Christ in his heart. Another song in which the protangonist becomes aware of the coming apocalypse while being in the wrong place is 'Tight Connection To My Heart' (originally recorded during the Infidels session as 'Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart'). Here the protagonist grabs his coat because feels the breath of the storm that is the apocalypse. He is in the wrong place with the wrong person having valued the wrong things (lulled to sleep in a town without pity where the water runs deep, it's all been a charade, a big joke that he'll remember to forget) and now, when it may be too late, he is searching for his true love (his "first love" - see Revelation 2: 4). His issue has been that he could not commit: "Never could learn to drink that blood / And to call it wine / Never could learn to hold you, love / And to call you mine." Like the foolish virgins, he may be left outside in the cold when the bridegroom arrives because he was not faithful to his true love at the moment of the second coming (Matthew 25: 1 - 13).
It is not possible to understand these songs or Dylan's journey without understanding the biblical material on which they draw. Without this, as is the case in much contemporary cultural comment, the work of art is actively misunderstood. This was the case with reviews of Infidels at the time which used 'Sweetheart Like You' as an example of Dylan's supposed misogeny. So these reviewers were using a song that actually critiques and undercuts misogeny as an example of misogeny itself and this fundamental misunderstanding was the result of a failure to recognise and understand biblical references and imagery.
Happy Birthday, Bob. See also Peter Banks, Malcolm Guite and Philip Ritchie.
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Bob Dylan - Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?).
"I'm walkin', through streets that are dead
Walkin', walkin' with you in my head
My feet are so tired,
My brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping." ('Love Sick').
Dylan comes from the tradition of hobo singers (Woody Guthrie) and beat poets (Jack Kerouac) for whom the journey and the documenting of their experience is life itself. When we first meet him singing in his original voice, on Bob Dylan, he's "ramblin' outa the wild West,/Leavin' the towns I love the best ... ''Til I come into New York town" ('Talkin' New York'). At this stage the ramblin', gamblin' hobo is a conscious image worn in homage to Woody Guthrie:
"I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seeing your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song ...". ('Song to Woody')
Though he starts out on his journey in imitation of others what he sees on his journey is original, surreal and unjust:
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..." ('A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall')
Ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to go back out and walk in the shadow of the storm:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
He travels the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair ('Ballad of Hollis Brown'); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" ('Chimes of Freedom'); surveys 'Desolation Road'; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl ('All Along the Watchtower'); takes shelter from a woman "With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" ('Shelter from the Storm'); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry ('Idiot Wind'); finds a pathway to the stars and can't believe he's survived and is still alive ('Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat'); rides the slow train up around the bend ('Slow Train'); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief ('I Believe in You'); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path ('Every Grain of Sand'); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire ('Caribbean Wind'); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love ('Tight Connection to My Heart'); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:
"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven').
Modern Times is an album that is also drenched in the imagery of journeying: "Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down/Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king". Dylan as journeyman, as traveller, is the key insight of the liner notes for Tell Tale Signs where Larry Sloman signs off with a paragraph quoting a myriad of Dylan's lyrics:
"He ain't talking, but he's still walking, heart burning, still yearning. He's trampling through the mud, through the blistering sun, getting damp from the misty rain. He's got his top hat on, ambling along with his cane, stopping to watch all the young men and young women in their bright-coloured clothes cavorting in the park. Despite all the grief and devastation he's seen on his odyssey, his heart isn't weary, it's light and free, bursting all over with affection for all those who sailed with him. Deep down he knows that his loyal and much-loved companions approve of him and share his code. And it's dawn now, the sun beginning to shine down on him and his heart is still in the Highlands, over those hills, far away. But there's a way to get there and if anyone can, he'll figure it out. And in the meantime, he's already there in his mind. That mind decidedly out of time. And we're all that much richer for his journey."
In many ways, this stream of inspiration has involved reworking and rearticulating the classic Dylan song, 'Blind Willie McTell', that was left off Infidels. Predominantly blues-based and extending the blues/folk metaphor of the drifter, Together Through Life finds Dylan's characters rambling through apocalyptic landscapes, experiencing life's hardness, grasping and eulogising love with a wry and sardonic irony wherever they can find it before the change that death will bring.
Dylan has said that:
"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil."
This is also the picture of traditional American music conjured up by Bob Dylan in 1966: "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy."
Greil Marcus has pointed out that this 'traditional music' - the ancient ballads of mountain music, songs like Buell Kazee's 'East Virginia', Clarence Ashley's 'Coo Coo Bird' or Dock Boggs' 'Country Blues' - are what Dylan and the Band tapped into when recording The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band, music which Marcus describes as a "kaleidoscope of American music". "The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music"", says Marcus, "is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back."
Biblical imagery and apocalyptic frameworks have been a constant within Dylan's work as throughout his career he has written songs that depict the apathy of humanity in the face of the coming apocalypse. What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
From Slow Train Coming onwards he equated the apocalypse with the imminent return of Christ. The return of Christ in judgement is the slow train that is "comin' up around the bend" and in the face of this apocalypse he calls on human beings to wake up and strengthen the things that remain. Similarly, in 'The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar', he sees the apocalypse coming ("Curtain risin' on a new age") but not yet here while the Groom (Christ who awaits his bride, the Church) is still waiting at the altar. In the time that remains he again calls on human beings to arise from our slumber: "Dead man, dead man / When will you arise? / Cobwebs in your mind / Dust upon your eyes" ('Dead Man, Dead Man').
In the light of this thread in Dylan's songs throughout this period, it seems to me to be consistent to read 'Jokerman', from Infidels as another song in this vein; as a song depicting the apathy of humanity in the face of the apocalypse and one which is shot through with apocalyptic imagery drawn from the Book of Revelation. We are the jokermen who laugh, dance and fly but only in the dark of the night (equated with sin and judgement) afraid to come into the revealing light of the Sun/Son.
Jokerman, though, is a greater song that any of those mentioned previously because its depiction of humanity is more nuanced. There is much that is negative: we are born with a snake in both our fists; we rush in where angels fear to tread; our future is full of dread; we are doing no more that keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within; we are going to Sodom and Gomorrah only knowing the law of the jungle (the law of revenge from the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy - 'an eye for an eye'). But these negatives are not the whole story as we also experience freedom, dance to the nightingale tune, fly high, walk on the clouds, and are a friend to the martyr. We have an inherent dignity and beauty to which only the greatest of artists such as Michelangelo can do justice. In Jokerman Dylan captures well the Biblical portrait of humanity as made in the image of God but marred by our rejection of God with our potential for beauty and compassion perverted into a selfish search for self-aggrandisement.
The final verse comes straight from the Book of Revelation and describes the birth of the AntiChrist who will deceive humanity into following him rather than Christ. The accusation and challenge that Dylan puts to us in the final lines of this final verse is that we know exactly what is happening (after all, it has all been prophesied in the Book of Revelation) but we make no response; we are apathetic in the face of the apocalypse. Our lack of response is what is fatal to us because it is only through repentance and turning to Christ that we will be saved from the coming judgement. These final lines are both an accusation and a challenge because, in line with the prophecy of Revelation, Dylan clearly believes that humanity as a whole will be apathetic and non-responsive but they must also be a challenge because, if there is no possibility that any of us will respond, why write the song at all!
In 'Sweetheart Like You', also from Infidels, we see the possibility of response through a wonderfully contemporary depiction of Christ's incarnation. The song is written from the perspective of a misogynist male employee in an all-male workplace that is literally a hell of a place in which to work. To be in here requires the doing of some evil deed, having your own harem, playing till your lips bleed. There's only one step down from here and that's the ironically named "land of permanent bliss."
Into this perverted and prejudiced environment comes a woman, the sweetheart of the song's title. She is a Christ figure; a sinless figure entering into a world of sin and experiencing abuse and betrayal (is "that first kiss" a Judas kiss?) from those she encounters and to whom she holds out the possibility of a different kind of existence. Dylan makes his equation of the woman with Christ explicit by quoting directly from Jesus: "They say in your father's house, there's many mansions" (John 14: 2).
The song's narrator is confused and challenged by her appearance. He wants to dismiss her out of hand and back to his stereotypical role for her - "You know, a woman like you should be at home / That's where you belong / Watching out for someone who loves you true / Who would never do you wrong" - but he can't simply dismiss her as she is really there in front of him and so he begins to wonder, "What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?" All the time he asks that question there is the possibility that he may respond to her presence without abuse or dismissal.
In 'I and I' Dylan gives an honest depiction of the difficulties of response (based no doubt on his own inability to keep the moral standards that he seems to have perceived God to have expected of him and which, no doubt, his church at the time expected of him). The central character in this song has taken the untrodden path where the swift don't win the race (Matthew 7: 13 & 14 - "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."). He has looked into justice's beautiful face and yet as we meet him we discover that he has just slept with a strange woman (i.e. he has had sex outside of marriage).
In creation, Dylan sings, we neither honour nor forgive. Instead we take; our nature is the survival of the fittest. When we encounter God, our sinful, selfish human nature encounters the demand for pure perfection - "no man sees my face and lives." 'I and I' is about the difficulty of living between these two poles; of having started out on the untrodden path but then having slipped back. The song is an evocation of the guilt that the protagonist feels; a guilt that forces him to leave the woman, to go out for a walk into the narrow lanes, pushing himself along the darkest part of the road to get himself back on track and then hearing the accepting, forgiving words of Christ in his heart, "I made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot."
'I and I' is again set in the context of the apocalypse: "the world could come to an end tonight." The protagonist is responding in the face of the apocalypse. Even though he has sinned he is leaving that sin behind, pushing himself along the road and listening to Christ in his heart. Another song in which the protangonist becomes aware of the coming apocalypse while being in the wrong place is 'Tight Connection To My Heart' (originally recorded during the Infidels session as 'Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart'). Here the protagonist grabs his coat because feels the breath of the storm that is the apocalypse. He is in the wrong place with the wrong person having valued the wrong things (lulled to sleep in a town without pity where the water runs deep, it's all been a charade, a big joke that he'll remember to forget) and now, when it may be too late, he is searching for his true love (his "first love" - see Revelation 2: 4). His issue has been that he could not commit: "Never could learn to drink that blood / And to call it wine / Never could learn to hold you, love / And to call you mine." Like the foolish virgins, he may be left outside in the cold when the bridegroom arrives because he was not faithful to his true love at the moment of the second coming (Matthew 25: 1 - 13).
It is not possible to understand these songs or Dylan's journey without understanding the biblical material on which they draw. Without this, as is the case in much contemporary cultural comment, the work of art is actively misunderstood. This was the case with reviews of Infidels at the time which used 'Sweetheart Like You' as an example of Dylan's supposed misogeny. So these reviewers were using a song that actually critiques and undercuts misogeny as an example of misogeny itself and this fundamental misunderstanding was the result of a failure to recognise and understand biblical references and imagery.
Happy Birthday, Bob. See also Peter Banks, Malcolm Guite and Philip Ritchie.
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Bob Dylan - Tight Connection To My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?).
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Together Through Life
The period since Time Out Of Mind has been particularly fertile for Bob Dylan's songwriting particularly when compared to the period between Infidels and Oh Mercy. In that period, as he wrote in Chronicles, he "felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck." His own songs had become strangers to him, there was a hollow singing in his heart and he couldn't wait to retire and fold the tent.
What changed him was a moment of revelation that came during a concert in Locarno, Switzerland as he stepped up to the mic, panicked and felt unable to sing. He has said that "it was almost like I heard a voice ... I'm determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not." That's when he knew, as Larry Sloman writes in the Tell Tale Signs booklet, that he had to "go out and keep playing those songs."
Those songs are the old, traditional songs of Americana: songs that he sang on his first album; songs that he sang on the two solo acoustic cover records that he recorded in 1992 and 1993; songs that he plays thematically on his successful radio show. With the publication of his memoirs and his radio show, there has been a renewed reflection on his own past and his own influences; one that seems to have released a stream of inspiration that is continued on his new album Together Through Life.
In many ways, this stream of inspiration has involved reworking and rearticulating the classic Dylan song, 'Blind Willie McTell', that was left off Infidels. Predominantly blues-based and extending the blues/folk metaphor of the drifter, Together Through Life finds Dylan's characters rambling through apocalyptic landscapes, experiencing life's hardness, grasping and eulogising love with a wry and sardonic irony wherever they can find it before the change that death will bring.
Dylan has said that:
"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil."
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Bob Dylan - Beyond Here Lies Nothin'.
What changed him was a moment of revelation that came during a concert in Locarno, Switzerland as he stepped up to the mic, panicked and felt unable to sing. He has said that "it was almost like I heard a voice ... I'm determined to stand, whether God will deliver me or not." That's when he knew, as Larry Sloman writes in the Tell Tale Signs booklet, that he had to "go out and keep playing those songs."
Those songs are the old, traditional songs of Americana: songs that he sang on his first album; songs that he sang on the two solo acoustic cover records that he recorded in 1992 and 1993; songs that he plays thematically on his successful radio show. With the publication of his memoirs and his radio show, there has been a renewed reflection on his own past and his own influences; one that seems to have released a stream of inspiration that is continued on his new album Together Through Life.
In many ways, this stream of inspiration has involved reworking and rearticulating the classic Dylan song, 'Blind Willie McTell', that was left off Infidels. Predominantly blues-based and extending the blues/folk metaphor of the drifter, Together Through Life finds Dylan's characters rambling through apocalyptic landscapes, experiencing life's hardness, grasping and eulogising love with a wry and sardonic irony wherever they can find it before the change that death will bring.
Dylan has said that:
"Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing 'I Saw The Light' or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil."
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Bob Dylan - Beyond Here Lies Nothin'.
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