by Bell, Ian
Besides, as the exasperated artist took pains to point out to Rolling Stone, Shakespeare’s enchanted castaway play has the definite article in its title. The difference might be no more than a nuance, but for Dylan it mattered: ‘The name of my record is just plain Tempest.’21 There was nothing plain about the contents. Even the opening track, ‘Duquesne Whistle’, is another of those tricks of misdirection at which the artist had long been adept.
It opens with the sunny, gentle sounds of what could be an old western swing band reaching the end of a number, as though we have just tuned in to some local Texas radio station back in the ’40s. That’s one clue to this album: amid the rockabilly, folk, blues and country most of the music is drawn from a time before there was the sound of someone called Bob Dylan. Then the song proper kicks in. It’s a train song, a jolly-sounding uptempo piece that could be in the lineage of all the old gospel train songs pointing down the track to redemption. But there’s something a little off here. Why is the train’s whistle blowing ‘like the sky’s gonna blow apart’ when the voice the singer says he can hear ‘must be the mother of our Lord’? Why, if that’s what is in his head, would the whistle sound ‘like it’s gonna kill me dead’? Dylan isn’t telling, but this jaunty roadhouse number is utterly deceitful. Even its promotional video would attract a little spurious controversy for a scene of notable mock brutality amid a scenario that had nothing whatever to do with trains of any description. In his ritual Rolling Stone interview to mark the album’s release, Dylan would manage to explain everything and nothing.
Tempest was like all the rest of them: the songs just fall together. It’s not the album I wanted to make, though. I had another one in mind. I wanted to make something more religious. That takes a lot more concentration – to pull that off ten times with the same thread – than it does with a record like I ended up with, where anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense.22
So: anything goes and you just gotta believe it will make sense? Dylan is describing both his method and the moral universe of the songs. The two are connected, in any case. It has nothing to do with God’s presence or absence; the artist continues to testify, here and there, to his faith. But one subtext of Tempest – in the title song it becomes explicit – is that anyone expecting explanations from the deity is wasting time and effort.
Several of the album’s songs tell stories; all are fabulistic in one way or another. A couple of the longest pieces, ‘Scarlet Town’ and the title track, are modelled explicitly on the old, endless folk ballads, shot through with supernatural mystery, that had once entranced the young Dylan. Indeed, ‘Barbara Allen’, the Scottish ballad he had sung at the Gaslight in the Village back in 1962, begins ‘In Scarlet Town where I was born’. ‘Roll On, John’, the song for Lennon, is constructed like a movie, opening on the murder scene before tracing moments in the victim’s life and work in a series of flashbacks. The death ballad ‘Tin Angel’ is meanwhile a hybrid of folk and film. Its immediate ancestry lies in the song ‘Love Henry’ that Dylan had performed on World Gone Wrong, but its origins stretch all the way back to one of the Child ballads first known in old Scotland. The tale of love, infidelity and murder – in which by the end bodies are actually piled up – could nevertheless be taken from a bloody western movie. That said, even a song such as ‘Pay in Blood’, which sounds like nothing so much as one of Dylan’s mid-’60s revenge songs, is a parable of a people enslaved – in biblical bondage, perhaps – rather than just the artist’s curse on those he happens to despise. Though the works sound utterly dissimilar, the nearest thing there is to Tempest in Dylan’s back catalogue is, in fact, the fable-laden John Wesley Harding.
Needless to say, the comparisons are anything but exact. For one thing, the obsession with enemies is harder to detect in the older album; for another, Harding’s treatment of women involves none of the sheer malevolence that recurs in Tempest. What Dylan intends by these themes is hard to puzzle out. Who are these ‘foes’? Is he serious when he gives free rein to vitriolic misogyny? By the time he made this album he had spent half a century picking fights in song. He had also been accused, often enough, of sexism as an artist and as an individual. ‘When the Ship Comes In’ from 1964 was a mock-biblical call to class war; ‘Positively 4th Street’ from the following year was a young man settling scores on his own behalf. As for his attitude towards women, pick an album. Dylan’s inability to see beyond his precious Madonna/whore caricatures has been criticised for decades. For many tastes, it has created odd undertones, let’s say, even in some of his best and loveliest songs. But something more is going on in Tempest.
You got too many lovers
waiting at the wall
If I had a thousand tongues
I couldn’t count them all
‘Narrow Way’
Set ’em up Joe, play ‘Walkin’ the Floor’
Play it for my flat-chested junkie whore
‘Scarlet Town’
You got the same eyes that your mother does
If only you could prove who your father was
Someone must’ve slipped a drug in your wine
You gulped it down and you crossed the line
‘Pay in Blood’
I can dress up your wounds
With a blood-clotted rag
I ain’t afraid to make love
To a bitch or a hag
‘Early Roman Kings’
Had Dylan been a hip-hop act – and in another time and place, who knows? – the denunciations would have come thick and fast. It is a fact, nevertheless, that violent language is thrown in all directions in most of the Tempest songs. It is also worth remembering that in these moods, for better or worse, the artist isn’t seeking approval. More importantly, the picking out of a handful of words here and there obscures the fact that statements function differently within different songs, that sometimes they act as a counterpoint to an entirely different sentiment, often within the space of a few lines. The raw accusation of fantastic promiscuity in ‘Narrow Way’, for example, takes us to an odd refrain: ‘If I can’t work up to you, / You’ll surely have to work down to me someday.’ The cheap insult has come from a man who thinks better of her than he thinks of himself. Another couplet manages the same effect. It is vicious by any measure – ‘Your father left you, your mother too / Even death has washed its hands of you’ – but it reaches that same refrain. Similarly, the poor ‘flat-chested junkie whore’ of ‘Scarlet Town’ is followed directly by that marvellous song’s marvellous conclusion:
I’m staying up late, I’m making amends
While we smile, all heaven descends
If love is a sin, then beauty is a crime
All things are beautiful in their time
The black and the white,
The yellow and the brown
It’s all right there in front of you
In Scarlet Town
Here and there in the songs you can hear Dylan, or the speaker, trying to come to terms with his perceptions of women and womanhood. He responds to what he takes to be different aspects of femininity, for good or ill. So much is recognised in a verse in ‘Soon After Midnight’ that manages to toy with the whore/Madonna cliché and introduce a mythical note with a nod to Elizabethan poetry and Edmund Spenser:
Charlotte’s a harlot
Dresses in scarlet
Mary dresses in green
It’s soon after midnight
And I’ve got a date with the Fairy Queen
Perhaps only this artist could meanwhile combine lechery and sanctity in the same verse. Once again, the song is ‘Narrow Way’:
I’ve got a heavy stacked woman
With a smile on her face
And she has crowned
My soul with grace
The lines from ‘Pay in Blood’ and ‘Early Roman Kings’, in brutal contrast, are hurled at enemies, at parasites and the makers of slaves, no matter the gender. In neither song does the singer intend to mind his language in the
presence of ‘foes’. Dylan is at war. He has a lot of enemies. He treats them all badly. Again, however, they are not the same enemies in every context. In one song the singer is ‘armed to the hilt’, in another he threatens to drag a man’s corpse ‘through the mud’. But there is a difference between vengeance, rebellion and honour.
Night after night, day after day
They strip your useless hopes away
The more I take the more I give
The more I die the more I live
I got something in my pocket make your eyeballs swim
I got dogs could tear you limb from limb
I’m circlin’ around the southern zone
I pay in blood, but not my own
‘Pay in Blood’
In Scarlet Town, you fight your father’s foes
Up on the hill, a chilly wind blows
You fight ’em on high and you fight ’em down in
You fight ’em with whiskey, morphine and gin
‘Scarlet Town’
‘Early Roman Kings’ is a prime example of Dylan’s ability almost to hear history as a series of echoes. Interviewed by Rolling Stone, he was clear about how his understanding had affected the writing of Tempest, far less forthcoming, as ever, about any specific conclusions he was prepared to identify or share with a journalist:
The thing about it is that there is the old and the new, and you have to connect with them both. The old goes out and the new comes in, but there is no sharp borderline. The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that. Forever through the centuries.23
‘Early Roman Kings’ therefore treats its imperial figures as mere gangsters in ‘Their sharkskin suits / Bow ties and buttons / High top boots’. Historically, it makes for a neat connection: ancient Rome’s rulers, with their clans and casual murders, were like nothing so much as the Mafia. But Dylan’s ‘kings’ are also America’s nineteenth-century robber barons ‘Blazin’ the rails / Nailed in their coffins / In top hats and tails’. They are, too, the slouching figures of organised crime, heading for ‘a Sicilian court’. They are the bankers, the lawyers, the politicians, the corrupt ruling elite of modern life. If Dylan calls them the kings of old Rome he is saying that, when power and money are at stake, nothing important ever changes.
They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They’ll destroy you as well
They’re lecherous and treacherous
Hell-bent for leather
Each of ’em bigger
Than all them put together
Sluggers and muggers
Wearing fancy gold rings
All the women goin’ crazy
For the early Roman kings
Dylan’s hyper-awareness of history as an active presence has been one of the distinguishing features of his ‘late period’. It explains many, if not all, of his acts of alleged plagiarism. But as interesting as the awareness of the past is the use to which he has put his understanding. Rarely does he content himself with just the facts. For him, everything has a mythical dimension. The past is a dream state, sometimes the nightmare, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says in Ulysses, ‘from which I am trying to awake’. ‘Narrow Way’, far from the best song on the album, has yet another extraordinary verse.
Ever since the British burned the White House down
There’s a bleeding wound in the heart of town
I saw you drinking from an empty cup
I saw you buried and I saw you dug up
The album’s most obvious point of contact with history is in its title song, ‘the Titanic song’. Yet again, the sheer length of a work would guarantee the attention of reviewers ever quick to assume that if Dylan was taking 45 verses to say something it must, almost by definition, be something important. ‘Tempest’ in fact competes for the title as the least of the album’s songs, ‘epic’ or not, and length has nothing much to do with its flaws. Too many of the verses are redundant, several are clumsily written and the song does not count, for this listener at least, as a musical treat. ‘Tempest’ is too self-conscious, even obvious, as an excursion into folk tradition. Talking to Rolling Stone, Dylan was entirely aware, as always, of his musical antecedents.
If you’re a folk singer, blues singer, rock & roll singer, whatever, in that realm, you oughta write a song about the Titanic, because that’s the bar you have to pass.24
In part, Dylan was explaining the fact that his work begins with an almost straight lift from ‘The Titanic’, a Carter Family song from the early 1950s. Before that there had been Lead Belly’s song of the same name, one that Huddie had chosen to call his own. Before that there had been Titanic songs by the dozen, some reputedly composed within days or weeks of the great ship’s sinking in 1912. What interested musicologists for long enough was that many of the early performers were black, despite the fact that the only non-white passenger allowed on the vessel had been a French Haitian with a white wife. African American singers, Lead Belly not least, took a certain grim satisfaction in the disaster as retribution for racism. Some chose to detect a divine judgement. In his The American Songbag (1927), in a note to a version he called ‘De Titanic’, Carl Sandburg asserted that ‘Negro troops sang the song crossing the submarine zone and in the trenches overseas’.25 In other words, there was a sardonic black song in circulation within five or six years of the tragedy. Equally, it has been claimed that the Titanic song group drew on African American folk tradition and a ballad describing the sinking of a long-forgotten Mississippi river-steamer.26 Dylan knew a lot about these things, but neither his borrowings from the Carter Family, nor his several shameless references to James Cameron’s risible 1997 Titanic movie, greatly aided an interminable song. To these ears ‘Tempest’ comes perilously close in places to sounding like something poor William McGonagall might have cherished.
It is a ship-of-fools song, an allegory. While the watchman sleeps and catastrophe approaches, humanity goes about its petty business. When disaster strikes, people show themselves for what they are, good or bad. Dylan’s point, the repeated theological note struck throughout the album, is that none of it sways an indifferent God whose purposes are not to be judged by His creation. One oddity is that an iceberg is never mentioned, perhaps because the writer thought there was no need to state the obvious. On the other hand, Dylan calls his song ‘Tempest’ while history relates that RMS Titanic met her fate on a clear, calm night. The artist gets to the burden of his tale, in any case, in three verses rather than forty-five. Yet again, Dylan’s favourite scriptural thriller justifies all.
In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years
He read the Book of Revelation
And he filled his cup with tears
When the Reaper’s task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest and the best
They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
Of the judgement of God’s hand
The phrase ‘dark illumination’ probably does not count as Dylan’s finest moment, just as ‘Roll On, John’ is a long way short of his finest song. Would so many reviewers have found it quite so affecting if its subject had not been quite so famous and so beloved? Dylan quotes Lennon songs – no problems over ‘attribution’, then – and throws in some of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, for reasons that are not entirely clear. Because Lennon was fond of Blake? Because there was both primal ferocity and gentle beauty contained within the former Beatle? Because it’s a jungle out there? But then, long delayed mourning aside, the song’s motives are not clear. You are given the uneasy sense, in fact, that this is a communion between superstars, those burdened souls. A long al
bum would still have run for over an hour if Dylan had decided against this song. As it is, what with the near-fourteen minutes of the title piece and this seven-and-a-half-minute eulogy, Tempest’s concluding passages feel like a long haul.
Miraculously, the album is not greatly diminished on that account. ‘Pay in Blood’, ‘Scarlet Town’, ‘Long and Wasted Years’, ‘Early Roman Kings’ and ‘Soon After Midnight’ more than prove that ‘late Dylan’ lacks nothing whatever in fire, power and poetry. The touring band, once again the studio band, are exemplary. Dylan’s eroded rock formation of a voice sounds wonderful, which is to say right, and once again the producer, this cool Jack Frost, has done a better job in producing a Bob Dylan album than most others have managed. If the artist had chosen to drown his books and break the spell with Tempest, disavowing Shakespeare all the while, it would have been a fitting ending. But there was no sign of any such intention.
*
He was on the road again in April and the first half of June. Touring took up most of July, all of August and the first half of September. In October, Mark Knopfler joined him on the trail for the first of 33 North American concerts. Read cold, the reviews seemed to depend on who was doing the writing. The critics who had observed Dylan for years allowed a benefit to every doubt. The New York Times sent the vastly experienced Jon Pareles to the reopening of the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, at the beginning of September. ‘A current Dylan concert is always a matter of shifting expectations,’ he wrote.
At first his voice sounds impossibly ramshackle, just a fogbound rasp. But soon, at least on a good night, his wilful phrasing and conversational nuances come through. While he has – for decades – rearranged many of his songs so that only the words are immediately recognizable, his musical choices aren’t exactly arbitrary. They lead listeners, and Mr Dylan as well, to grapple with the songs anew.