Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan
Page 21
*
Street-Legal would be album number 18 of those recorded in a studio and number 23 in the grand total if, that is, the rather fine triple-disc compendium Masterpieces, released only in Australasia and Japan in March 1978, is included.21 By that year, totting up the titles was becoming tiresome, certainly for Dylan. He had long since acquired the habit of treating each new set publicly as just another album, part of the routine, even a chore. The fact that he would spend only four days in April on the recordings that became Street-Legal was symptomatic. He could devote weeks to rehearsing for a concert tour yet expect a modern album – modern even by the standards of 1978 – to be achieved just by rolling the tapes while the band played.
Dylan wanted to record his latest group of songs ‘live’ in an era in which, almost as a matter of habit, artists were assembling tracks from discrete recordings of their constituent parts. With almost two months free between concerts, he was also maintaining – in later interviews it would be stated as a matter of fact – that he had only those four days in which to cut the album. There was no technical reason, however, why his wish for unmediated performances could not have been granted. All that was required was for Dylan to accept that it was impossible to make such an album at the record industry’s equivalent of a moment’s notice, especially when he was employing a pretty big group of musicians. He couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. To defer to technology, even to deign to take an interest in technology, seemed to Dylan to amount to surrender and betrayal. In time, the attitude would become near-fatal to his recorded work. It almost killed Street-Legal.
‘Almost’ is the disputable word. Some who concede that the resultant album was a mess and an audiophile’s nightmare, at least in its first released form, still rank Street-Legal high in Dylan’s canon.22 Of notable critics, Michael Gray has been perhaps the most assertive – and the most honest – writing that this set amounts to ‘one of Dylan’s most important, cohesive albums’, a collection of ‘astonishing complexity and confidence, delivered in one of Dylan’s most authoritative voices, and extremely badly produced’.23 In 1978, most American reviewers would have wondered what Gray was on about, or on. For them, abysmal production was the least of it. Where Street-Legal was concerned, critical opinion in Europe and America would be wide oceans apart.
Perhaps because it yielded an unlikely hit single in the United Kingdom and across Europe in the shape of ‘Baby, Stop Crying’, European buyers and reviewers were always more enthusiastic towards the album than Americans. Street-Legal’s chart placings – number two in the UK, eleven in the US – would make the divergence stark. The additional fact that Dylan’s six nights of concerts at London’s Earls Court Exhibition Centre in June would be viewed by the British press as historic triumphs while his American shows were scorned (on a good night) set a small critical tradition in stone.
When the album was released in June, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, grading music like chicken portions, would award Dylan C+ and remark that the ‘divorcé’ was ‘too in love with his own self-generated misery to break through the leaden tempos that oppress his melodies’. The reviewer would then wonder if Dylan intended ‘his Neil Diamond masquerade as a joke’. By 1983, to take another tiny example, an extensive Dylan entry in the so-called Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll would note Budokan and the 1978 world tour as examples of Dylan ‘redoing his old songs with some of the trappings of a Las Vegas lounge act’. The entry would fail even to mention Street-Legal.
In Rolling Stone itself, after kicking off his review with the splendidly eccentric claim that Dylan’s ‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ ‘is really just a pastiche of the best moments’ – best moments? – ‘of the Eagles’ Hotel California’, Greil Marcus would tear Street-Legal apart. The artist had never sounded ‘sillier’ or ‘so utterly fake’. One track was ‘intolerably smug’, another simply ‘creepy’. As for the singing, Marcus would write, ‘it’s simply impossible to pay attention to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time’. Besides, ‘all that raw chanting in big halls … has at once produced a new vocal style, and destroyed Dylan’s timing and his ability to bring emotional precision to a lyric’. Comically, way back in 1978, just four short years after his return from an eight-year lay-off and long before the Never-Ending Tour had done real damage to his voice, the artist would be accused of giving far too many concerts. At its indignant, petulant heart, the review would accuse Dylan of ‘not giving a damn whether a record is good enough for his audience’.24
Such commentary did its work. After its release in June, Street-Legal would wind up as the first fully realised Dylan studio album since 1964 – Dylan and the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack aside – to fail to reach the US top ten. Later it would be identified as, at best, a relative failure after Blood on the Tracks and Desire. Its lack of thematic unity – as though Desire had possessed such a thing – would be held against it. The musical settings provided by that big, brassy band and the backing vocalists would be held to suffocate the lyrics. The contrast between verbal complexity in some of the songs and a certain maudlin, sexist sentimentality in others would be picked out – Marcus would set that ball rolling – as a deep flaw. The charge sheet would say that the writing didn’t hold together, that the ‘slick’ music jarred and that the production was diabolical. The case would have some merit.
In 1978, on first hearing, you were invited to wonder if Street-Legal had been produced at all. Clearly, there was a big difference between what Dylan heard while the band played and the sounds struggling technicians managed to capture from the space at Rundown. Those ‘technical issues’ were at the heart of the problem. Dylan had elected to use his bare-bones Santa Monica rehearsal hall and a mobile recording truck rather than bother to find a professional studio that could accommodate live performance. The technicians’ attempts to adapt Rundown while an impatient star nagged were hurried improvisations at best. What emerged from the resulting murk at the former rifle factory was the worst of both worlds: live performances in collision with 24-track technology when neither was organised to meet the needs of the other. To top it all the final mix would be, politely, a strange affair.
The average record buyer cared nothing for these details and neither did Dylan. The difference was that the customer expected the artist and those around him to take care of tedious technical matters. The fan wasn’t supposed to pause and wonder why the sound was thin, the vocals too often indistinct, the drums sometimes a mere suggestion in the distance. Dylan, who had spent most of the ’60s ignoring the mysteries of the new-fangled stereophonic mix, was at home only in the multidimensional universe of live performance. That wasn’t available in your local record store. Even the release of Desire in the then-fashionable quadraphonic format – for those who could afford the gear – had failed to bridge the gap between Dylan’s reality and what vinyl could deliver. Something had to give, but it wouldn’t be the artist. The still-debatable reputation of Street-Legal was one result.
Set all that aside. Make allowances for those ‘technical issues’. The album remains a disjointed affair. Some of the writing is thrilling and some not much better – for Marcus was not entirely wrong – than Dylan-by-numbers. ‘Changing of the Guards’ is an indisputably (says this writer) great song while ‘Is Your Love in Vain?’ is risible, even embarrassing. Seriously: what was anyone supposed to make of ‘Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow / Do you understand my pain?’ There is something of a gamut to be run, in other words. ‘No Time to Think’, at over eight minutes, is a track that defies the usual description of the artist-as-poet. Overly rhetorical it might be, but it works well enough on the page; less well, hardly at all in places, as a piece of music. ‘New Pony’ is a standard blues metaphor to a standard blues riff and strikes this listener, at every hearing, as tiresome and bombastic. ‘Baby, Stop Crying’ veers between sounding like a corny lament and a description of a domestic scene you would not want to witness. Perhaps, in strict fairness, that w
as the driving idea behind the song, but the performance seems forced and false.
‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ is the album’s second great song. It is also a constant reminder of what Street-Legal might have been. Who is the personage addressed, God or overlord? The song begins:
Señor, señor, do you know where we’re headin’?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?
Seems like I been down this way before
Is there any truth in that, señor?
And ends:
Señor, señor, let’s disconnect these cables
Overturn these tables
This place don’t make sense to me no more
Can you tell me what we’re waiting for, señor?
Michael Gray has called this ‘a classic post-Vietnam song’ while pointing out the ‘Christ-gesture’ of ‘Overturn these tables’. That reading is entirely fair.25 Gray understands the song as a marker on the last stretch of Dylan’s road to becoming a declared Christian. The entire album is meanwhile understood in terms of salvation lost and found. On its own terms, this counts as a solid argument.
Nevertheless, to read Street-Legal entirely in terms of Dylan edging towards God remains something of a stretch. If religious imagery is the only guide, it needs to be remembered that the artist had been inching towards the idea of salvation for better than a decade without taking the final step. Or rather, he had been doing so without choosing to make a formal declaration of faith and allegiance. A trawl through the basement tapes will turn up plenty of examples of the ‘spiritual Dylan’. John Wesley Harding is meaningless if you ignore its religious content. A sense of God runs through Planet Waves and through Blood on the Tracks. As Gray himself pointed out, He is there plainly – though strangely He was overlooked at the time – in Desire’s ‘Oh, Sister’. Hindsight says it would have been odd if Street-Legal had contained no further sightings, or fresh evidence that Dylan was becoming ripe for a full-blown conversion. He had been a religious writer, one way or another, for years. None of this compensates for the album’s flaws, however. That miracle was not achieved.
One problem in writing about Dylan and religion, whether in the context of ‘Señor’ or any other song, is that the artist had never denied God. In the ’60s he had made all the then-usual statements about churches and organised belief and why they were probably not needed. He had not said, not once, that he did not believe, or even that he doubted. God was invoked repeatedly; religious assumptions were Dylan’s assumptions. Take, for one example, the forever overpraised ‘Masters of War’, probably written at the end of 1962 or in the first days of 1963. Its approach to war and imperialism, though utterly simplistic, is not so far distant from the approach taken in ‘Señor’. Its moral world turns on the betrayal of Judas and the forgiveness of Jesus. Christ is more forgiving than the singer, of course, but there is no scepticism towards the proposition that He exists and forgives.
Dylan caused confusion in the ’60s by persistently denying his Jewish origins, by engaging in satire, by assailing hypocrisy, by finding himself conscripted on behalf of a counter-culture that placed no value on church-going after the alternative spiritual supermarket was declared open for business. Things can become confusing when you have the likes of Allen Ginsberg pouring his patent medicine essence of misunderstood Buddhism in your ear, when people on every side are talking about ‘karma’, and when there is a wife with a taste for all things New Age waiting patiently at home. But an outright non-believer? The Dylans did not raise their children in that manner. He had been coming to terms with the Jewish faith of his ancestors since at least the beginning of the 1970s.
This did not, specifically did not, make him a potential recruit for Jesus – he would resolve the contradiction to his own satisfaction before long – but it was proof enough of his inclinations. Not a single song from the 1960s or the 1970s justifies the supposition that this artist was ever far from God. If Dylan embarked upon a spiritual journey, it was a short trip. Street-Legal merely refined his theological position a little.
‘Changing of the Guards’ is a degree more complicated than anything else on the album and all the better for it. Christ pops up here, too, as a kind of spiritual superhero on behalf of the meek, anticipating the saviour Dylan would embrace before long. Here too, set in the landscape of mythology and Tarot cards, with an Isis figure for a heroine – perhaps the writer had been reading his D.H. Lawrence after all – are the end times: ‘Merchants and thieves hungry for power’, ‘destruction in the ditches’, ‘Renegade priests and treacherous young witches’, ‘dog soldiers’ in the ‘palace of mirrors’. The last verse will promise peace, the fall of false idols and even the conquest of ‘cruel death’ itself. First, pronouns having been switched, Christ militant will have a word.
Gentlemen, he said
I don’t need your organization
I’ve shined your shoes
I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards
But Eden is burning
Either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage
For the changing of the guards …26
In that context, the shuffling of Tarot cards within the song becomes a little puzzling. There is no doubt that Dylan is using the imagery of the old esoteric poker deck extravagantly, though perhaps with less credulity than fans of all-knowing allegorical pictograms would like to believe. Certainly there are explicit references to cards from both the Tarot’s ‘major arcana’ and the minor, whether Fortune, Death, the Moon, the Chariot (‘on the wheels of fire’) or the Tower. The King and Queen of Swords are in the deck, too, as is the Three of Swords with that ‘heart-shaped tattoo’. A lot depends, however, on the pack being employed. For example, the card known as the Tower in English – hence Dylan’s reference – is generally called La Maison Dieu, the House of God, in the sixteenth-century Tarot de Marseille. Equally, many Europeans have a peculiar tradition that the pack is best used just to play games. Perhaps they are not alone.
Did Dylan believe in Tarot? He might well have been a believer in trumped-up anglophone notions of divination. Some fans would love to think so. Interviewing the artist in London in June, Robert Shelton would certainly mention his ‘fascination’ with the pack.27 If Dylan possessed a real faith in the cards, he could even have picked up the idea, entirely spurious, that the Tarot has an Isis connection. Like much else that was exotic and unverifiable, this version of cartomancy caught on widely in the 1970s among those packing for their spiritual journeys.
Equally, the artist might simply have decided that a song with a mock-prophetic intent, even a serious mock-prophetic intent, could stand a little esoteric colour. He wasn’t picky. For Dylan, arresting images were, as they remain, pictures worth a couple of thousand words, functioning as a language in their own right. Asking how Tarot squared with the Christian element in ‘Changing of the Guards’ is probably a fruitless exercise. What we know is that this artist responds first to imagery that he can put to his own use. The verbal fantasy landscape painting evident in ‘Changing of the Guards’ isn’t so different, as a matter of technique, from what Dylan had achieved in ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’, or from what he would achieve in ‘Jokerman’. It might also explain why in due course he would respond with such intensity to the Book of Revelation.
Imagery, not religion, gives ‘Changing of the Guards’ its power, but that’s just the difference – one that Dylan would soon forget too easily – between a poem and a sermon. As far as faith goes, however, what matters about the song is the attraction of the messiah figure for this supposedly Jewish writer. Hitherto, the serious uses to which Dylan had put religious language had been justifiable, more or less, in terms of the Torah. Even this song might have been excused, had there been a need, as a version of Jewish messianic prophecy, of which there is an abundance. Yet looking back it is possible to see just how open Dylan already was to the claim that prophecy had been fulfilled. In London that summe
r Shelton would assert proudly, ‘He knew I wouldn’t ask him about God.’ The enquiry had been made too many times before.
Street-Legal’s third great song, hampered by its routine arrangement, encumbered by the girl singers whose presence would become a persistent distraction in the years ahead, is ‘Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)’. This is another definitive rebuttal to the claim that Dylan’s writing had begun to falter. It is evidence, probably superfluous, that his need for Jacques Levy’s help on Desire had been personal rather than professional. Again, however, if evidence is required that here was a man lost in life and in the toils of spiritual conflict, most questions are answered.
I fought with my twin, that enemy within
’Till both of us fell by the way
Horseplay and disease is killing me by degrees
While the law looks the other way
You can understand ‘the law’ in the conventional sense of the forces encountered by a man forever on the road – one idea that never grows old for Dylan – or you can understand it in the Jewish sense on which the writer was raised. It could be a reference to coppers; it could be a reference to the Halakha, the body of laws for religion and for life. You can take the journey itself as spiritual or as another reworking of the shifting narrative trail traced in ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. You can spot the images of personal loss or find something a good deal deeper in the idea of an individual struggling with ‘that enemy within’, himself, his ‘twin’. You can take it, above all, that this Dylan is a man who is approaching God yet is still, given recent events in his private life, somehow incomplete.