FIVE SONGS FROM ‘OH MERCY’: HOUND DOG HOWLIN’…
One guitar plays a quiet riff. Then another begins to hit a melody line. There is a crash of cymbals. A deep, booming bass throb. It sounds less like a band playing together than layers of sound being imposed on top of each other. Each instrument seems to be playing its own tune. This is the trademark Daniel Lanois effect, as previously heard on U2’s The Joshua Tree. Then we hear Bob Dylan’s voice, sounding more than a little guarded as he spits out the cryptic lyrics: …We live in a political world/ Love don’t have any place/ We’re living in times when men commit crimes/ And crime don’t have a face… The level of the instruments rises in the background. The insistent fast beat of the congas is turned up almost as high as the vocals. The track, which combines a blues sensibility with a looped rhythm like those used in electronic dance music, finally simply fades out. But one gets the impression that the song could continue indefinitely.
Throughout the 1980s Bob Dylan had struggled to come to terms with the recording technology of his day. For most his of career he had made records that sounded like, and often were, just himself or him and his a band playing live in a studio. But now the availability of cheap portable synthesisers and the advent of computerised recording technology, as well as the emergence of hip hop and the merging of ‘rock’ and ‘dance’ forms in records like David Bowie’s Let’s Dance (1983) (produced by ‘disco grandmaster’ Nile Rodgers), Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love (1985) and Prince’s Sign O’ The Times (1987) (both self produced), had placed a new emphasis on deeper, more layered rhythms. In such an environment the role of the record producer became ever more prominent, with ‘auteur producers’ like Lanois, Brian Eno and Rodgers developing their own ‘signature’ sounds. This left artists like Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell, whose music was based on traditional folk and blues roots, in something of a quandary. Neil Young’s characteristically perverse response was to turn out a series of experimental records – including an electronic pop album with vocoder vocals, a rhythm and blues excursion and a ‘retro’ early rock and roll pastiche.
OH MERCY!!!
Dylan had mostly stayed clear of current recording trends. The experiments with echo effects and ‘dance production’ which hip hop producer Arthur Baker added to some tracks on Empire Burlesque sounded highly incongruous. But the work of producers like Lanois and Steve Lillywhite (especially with Peter Gabriel and the Pogues) had demonstrated that the new technology could be used to create more ‘organic’ sounds. Oh Mercy was recorded in Lanois’ home studio in New Orleans and the sound of the album attempts to recreate the hot, ‘swampy’ atmosphere of the ‘birthplace of the blues’. On Man in the Long Black Coat chirping cicadas are even added to the mix. Dylan himself had been going through the least critically and popularly acclaimed period of his career, with Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove and the live Dylan and the Dead sets receiving damning reviews, not to mention poor sales. There is no doubt that he needed to recover his ‘mojo’.
It is, however, Dylan’s own new approach to song writing, rather than Lanois’ production, which really distinguishes Oh Mercy. Most of the songs on the album feature short verses full of clipped colloquial phrases, as if he is leaving a great deal unsaid. They are mysterious and compelling in a way that his records had not been for some years. Working with Lanois was an uneasy compromise for Dylan, as it involved him surrendering a considerable degree of control over the finished product. But Lanois, with his distinctive way of balancing and juxtaposing sound, proved to be an ideal fit. The viciousness of Political World – which is a diatribe as cynical in its own terms as Ballad of a Thin Man, Masters of War or Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window – is modulated by the ‘homeliness’ of the sound, which uses modern techniques to imitate the uneasy but somehow reassuring feeling of early blues records. Setting a considerable pace, Dylan pumps out eleven verses in just over three and a half minutes, without ever sounding breathless.
The song is a snapshot of the mind of a figure who feels out of place in the modern world. It is not a ‘political’ song as such. However, it communicates a feeling of personal alienation which recalls It’s Alright Ma or Subterranean Homesick Blues. There is no chorus but the line …We live in a political world… appears at the beginning of each verse. Dylan’s disdain for politics in general had been clear for a long time. He had abandoned writing explicitly about social and political issues after his first couple of years of fame. Here his notion of what is ‘political’ equates with what is false, twisted and mendacious. The song is littered with images and statements which reinforce this. We hear that ‘icicles’ are …hanging down… and that, although we may hear ‘wedding bells ringing’ and ‘angels singing’ these are obscured by the clouds that …cover up the ground… This is a soulless, spiritually devoid landscape.
By this point in the song, however, Dylan’s characteristically dark humour has begun to assert itself. He comes on like John Bunyan, using pointedly obvious personification and sharp internal rhymes …Wisdom… we are told …is thrown into jail/ It rots in a cell, is misguided as hell/ Leaving no-one to pick up trail… In the following verse, perhaps the most effective in the whole song, we are told that …Mercy walks the plank… which is counter posed against …life is in mirrors, Death disappears/ Up the steps into the nearest bank… The personifications of ‘Mercy’ (the name of an innocent young girl in Pilgrim’s Progress) as a disgraced pirate and ‘Death’, the ‘grim reaper’ himself, hot footing it away to gloat over his material wealth, are disarmingly audacious.
OH MERCY!!!
It also becomes increasingly difficult to take the sentiments of the song completely seriously, as Dylan piles on the angst. He paints a highly generalised picture of the modern world, a place in which …courage is a thing of the past/ Houses are haunted, children are unwanted/ The next day could be your last… But this description is so exaggerated that we must surely realise by now that Dylan is deliberately taking on the role of a ‘harbinger of doom’ but is doing so in such a melodramatic way that at times he resembles horror movie maestro Vincent Price (who in 1982 had delivered a typically mannered voiceover for Michael Jackson’s mega-hit Thriller).
Dylan continues to characterise the modern world in doom-laden terms. He asserts that we live in …cities of lonesome fear… in which there is …no one to check, it’s all a stacked deck… But in the last lines of each verse, he now begins to challenge the veracity of this vision. …We all know for sure that it’s real… he cackles, unconvincingly but then admits …you’re never sure why you’re here… The po-faced …You can travel anywhere and hang yourself there/ You always got more than enough rope… adds to the growing sense of self conscious mockery. The subject of the song is described, rather comically as …Turning and a-thrashing about… while the lines …As soon as you’re awake you’re trained to take/ What looks like the easy way out… could even work as a summary of the sentiments of Subterranean Homesick Blues. But such lines reveal the increasingly self-reflexive nature of the song.
After another piece of cartoonish personification which mocks the idea of ‘revolution’: …Peace is not welcome at all/ It’s turned away from the door to wonder some more/ Or put up against the wall… Dylan ends the song in a highly curious way, on the one hand apparently condemning a culture of selfishness …Everything’s hers and his… juxtaposing this against an instruction to …Climb into the frame and shout God’s name… In a parting shot before the fade out he then admits that …You’re never sure what it is…
The songs on Oh Mercy, as well as detailing another of Dylan’s continual struggles to regain his poetic soul, go some way towards resolving the spiritual crisis that had loomed over his work in this, his most problematic decade. There is little doubt that he retains his fascination with spirituality in general, and in elements of Christianity and Judaism in particular, but his disillusionment with institutionalised religion is as bitter here as it was when he once sang about the promulgation of …flesh colored Christs that glow in the dark… At the end of his apparent denunciation of the morality of the modern world in the song, he tacitly admits that he has no answers to the malaise he has identified. ‘Shouting God’s name’ will clearly not solve all these problems, especially as – in this ‘political’ (rather than spiritual) world – we cannot even give a name to that deity. There will be no ‘deus ex machina’ solution here.
While on Slow Train Coming and Saved the name of God was continually and explicitly referred to, here Dylan can only communicate spiritual uncertainty. Dylan has always expressed a belief in some kind of ‘higher power’. But by the time of Oh Mercy he seems to be thoroughly disillusioned with conventional religion. He reverts to a position of poetic detachment, combined with continuing self examination which is leavened by his own highly characteristic ironic humour.
This use of irony is amplified even more than the album’s other up tempo number, Everything is Broken, which is also supposedly a condemnation of the ‘sins’ of the modern world. But here Dylan’s positioning of himself as a curmudgeon is balanced by a self-mocking tone. The scenario he describes is more a dysfunctional mess than a spiritual void. The track features Dylan prominently on harmonica and again benefits from Lanois’ layered approach to the use of instruments. It consists of four six line verses, each ending in the title refrain, with a short bridge in the mid section. In terms of any progression of ideas it is rather a ‘one note’ effort which almost literally piles on one ironic statement on top of another. But its message is certainly clear. In live performance it became even more of a ‘fun song’. Between 1991 and 2003 it was performed over the highly distinctive repeated riff of Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn Theme, originally composed in 1959 for a TV detective show but made famous Duane Eddy’s hit guitar instrumental. This gives the song even more of the air of a Hollywood horror movie than Political World.
OH MERCY!!!!!!
The four three lines of each verse are listings of all the ‘broken’ things in the world, which are snappily rhymed as ‘strings/springs’, ‘heads/beds’, ‘place/gates’, ‘parts/hearts’, ‘saws/laws’, ‘bones/phones’, ‘ploughs/vows’ and ‘tools/rules’. The bridge section hints that the song may be about a woman leaving him rather than a real condemnation of the evils of the world. This is, after all, a blues song: …Seems like every time I turn around… the narrator sighs…Something else just hit the ground… We may surmise that all these broken objects are the result of their domestic rows and that the narrator is merely feeling sorry for himself. In the penultimate line of each verse various conclusions are drawn. The put upon narrator tells us that …Ain’t no use jivin’, ain’t no use jokin’ … Later he admits that their ‘broken words’ were …never meant to be spoken… and that in such a situation all you can do is …Take a deep breath… as you …feel like you’re chokin’… Finally, in a sign that the whole song is really a darkly humorous blues pastiche he wheels out the two most common clichés uttered by sexually deprived blues singers: …Hound dog howlin’, bullfrog croakin’… In Neil Young’s live version the singer even lets out a jokey ‘howl’ at the end of the song.
It was a great relief for many Dylan fans to hear him presenting songs in this highly comical-ironic way. In 1983 he may have described himself as a ‘Jokerman’ but few of the songs he had released since demonstrated his renowned wit. Everything is Broken has been covered widely by artists as diverse as Sheryl Crow, Tim O’Brien and Duke Robillard. A gravel-voiced Lucinda Williams delivers an especially evocative version, which communicates Dylan’s ‘double edged’ implications very effectively (as well as carrying out a similarly winning job on Political World) while veteran bluesman R.L. Burnside graces the song with a striking guitar passage.
Disease of Conceit is another generalised complaint about the world, which focuses on Dylan’s preoccupation with hypocrisy. On Oh Mercy, Dylan accompanies his rather desperate, slightly strangled-sounding vocals over his distinctive ‘stabbing’ solo piano. The pronounced echo gives the impression that this is some kind of gospel number being performed in a church. Although Dylan uses a similar structure to Everything is Broken and Political World – with a repeated refrain at the end of each of the four verses, much repetition of the title phrase throughout and a short bridge which comments on the song – he comes over as deadly serious throughout. The word ‘conceit’ actually has two quite different meanings. To be ‘conceited’ implies having an over exaggerated sense of one’s own importance.
The lesser known use of the word denotes a rather fanciful or dubious use of poetic metaphor, in which Dylan himself indulges here (with surely unintended irony) without the levity he displays in the two earlier songs. Each verse begins with a description of the extent of the malaise with the phrase …There’s a whole lot of… This covers ‘people suffering’, ‘hearts breaking’, ‘dying tonight’ and ‘people in trouble tonight’, all of whom are victims of this ‘disease’. Dylan employs some snatches of very straightforward blues imagery to tell us that it …comes right down the highway/ Straight down the line/ Rips into your senses through your body and your mind… Then he mumbles, as if there is nothing he can do about this…Nothing about it that’s sweet…
The second verse is at first a little more graphic with the disease being personified, rather as if it is some kind of zombie which …Steps into your room, eats your soul… The rhymes that follow, however, beginning with …Over your senses/ You have no control… and continuing with …Ain’t nothing too discreet… seem rather forced. In the third verse Dylan attempts to employ a boxing metaphor. We hear that the disease …Comes out of nowhere/ And you’re out for the count… But the metaphor is not extended. We are merely told that …from the outside world, the pressure will mount… and that it will ..turn you into a piece of meat… The ‘clunkiness’ of this line is not helped by the bridge, which claims that ...Conceit is a disease/ That the doctors got no cure/ They’ve done a lot of research on it/ But what it is, they’re still not sure…
The attack on the conceited becomes a little more effective in the final verse, as Dylan alludes to Edgar Allan Poe by stating that the disease can give one …delusions of grandeur/And an evil eye… and …Give you the idea that you’re too good to die… This is rather more pointed in terms of identifying who the song is aimed at, although the following: …Then they bury you from your head to your feet… again sounds somewhat contrived. The song is certainly rather vague in its targets, and the ‘conceit’ of the extended metaphor of the ‘disease’ is stretched to the limit. In Dylan’s sporadic live performances between 1989 and 1996, however, he often delivers the song with considerable emotion and belief. In Chronicles he states that he was inspired to write it after having heard the recent revelations about Jimmy Swaggart, a high profile evangelical TV preacher who had been implicated in various prostitution scandals. Dylan states that …The song rose up until I could read the look in its eyes. In the quiet of the evening, I didn’t have to hunt far for it… Unfortunately, however, beyond the lines about ‘being too good to die’, there is no real evidence for this connection in the song itself, although it certainly does touch upon issues of religious hypocrisy.
JIMMY SWAGGART’s ‘TV CONFESSION’
Where Teardrops Fall is another song which is greatly enhanced by Lanois’ sparing production. This includes snatches of saxophone and some effective use of a washboard (an instrument once prominent in old blues and later in skiffle). The guitar is modulated to sound rather like a country-style steel guitar, delicately hinting at the song’s poignant theme. It has one of the album’s most affecting melodies and in some ways could be designed for a crooner such as Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. It thus anticipates some of Dylan’s later songs such as To Make You Feel My Love, Beyond the Horizon or Moonlight. To some extent it is also reminiscent of Oscar Hammerstein 11’s lyric to his classic You’ll Never Walk Alone in its use of an extended metaphor, a feature which Dylan again uses here but in a more sustained way in Disease of Conceit. it opens with its chorus, which ends in the title refrain. The chorus appears four times and is punctuated by longer verses that also function as bridges.
Dylan’s vocals are restrained and yearning. This time the grief of the separated lovers is presented as a physical location ‘where teardrops fall’. The narrator looks back on their love, romanticising this place of refuge as being …Far away where the soft winds blow/ Far away from it all… In the second chorus he catches a tantalising glimpses of his lover…in the flickering light…. This place of teardrops may well be a ‘Hollywood scene’ but it is certainly well lit.
The first verse (or bridge) begins with the lines …We banged the drum slowly/ And played the fife lowly … lines which are taken from Marty Robbins’ gunfighter ballad Streets of Laredo where they describe a funeral march. The narrator then goes into full sentimental mode, revelling in clichés: …You know the song in my heart / In the turning of twilight/ In the shadows of moonlight/ You can show me a new place to start…. The narrator makes the appeals to his lover that if they could meet there at sunset, perhaps the sun would not necessarily set on their love. This ‘conceit’ is extended into the next chorus, in which he further mortifies himself, telling her that …I’ve torn my clothes and I’ve drained the cup/ Strippin’ away at it all… and that he is …Thinking of you when the sun comes up…. In ‘the place of teardrops’, night has now descended.
The narrator then throws out more metaphors at his lover. He proposes that they meet …By rivers of blindness/ In love and with kindness/ We could hold up a toast if we meet/ To the cutting of fences/ To sharpen the senses/ That linger in the fireball heat… In his romantic over excitement, and in proposing the toast, the narrator mixes metaphors like a bad cocktail. The mention of ‘fireball heat’ is a surprisingly apocalyptic turn of phrase. Finally, in his apparent desperation, he resorts to declaring …Roses are red, violets are blue… a line originally derived from Spenser’s Fairie Queen but nowadays most associated with corny Valentine’s Day card doggerel. He follows this with the distinctly odd phrase …time is beginning to crawl… and concluding that … I might just have to go see you, where teardrops fall… The implication seems to be that the longer he waits to see her, the harder it will be. But here, as elsewhere, his entreaties are far from convincing. He seems to be only half committed to her memory. We get the sense that he is nostalgic their relationship but will not really risk attempting to relive it.
Shooting Star, which closes the album, is another song about memory and a powerful evocation of loss. It lacks the sweeping melody of Where Teardrops Fall but eschews its sentimentality. On the album it has another highly effective opening, as slightly echoey guitar and dobro wring out a snatch of a melody which sounds rather like an old Civil War song, or perhaps something by Stephen Foster. The song is propelled by a slow drum beat, as if we are at a military funeral. Each of the three verses opens and closes with a two line variation on the repeated refrain. The narrator looks up at the night sky, sees a shooting star falling and immediately announces that …I thought of you… He then laments that this person was …trying to break into another world/ A world I never knew… Now possessed by nostalgia, he begins to speculate as to this person’s eventual fate: …I always kind of wondered if you ever made it through…
The song is exceptionally well balanced in its imagery and structure. In the next verse the narrator turns his revelatory sighting of the cosmic event into self reflection:…I saw a shooting star tonight and I thought of me… He muses on whether …I became what you wanted me to be… and asks …Did I miss the mark or overstep the line that only you could see?… Then we are into the bridge section, which rather surprisingly suddenly delivers some religious imagery: …Listen to the engine, listen to the bell/ As the last fire truck from hell goes rolling by… This is a slightly bizarre collocation, combining descriptions of a fire engine with a hint that the Last Judgement is about to occur. This is reinforced by …All good people are praying… although the following lines …It’s the last temptation, the last account/ The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount… appear to be more direct references to the Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus. The verse ends with the simple but haunting …last radio playing…
The final verse returns us to the narrator’s conversation with the subject of the song: …Saw a shooting star tonight/ Slip away… The next lines …Tomorrow will be/ Another day… are a slight paraphrase of the iconic final lines spoken by Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) to the roguish Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) in the Civil War epic Gone With the Wind, indicating that their relationship is (probably) over. The narrator exhibits a similar mixture of finality and regret when he admits ruefully that …Guess it’s too late for you to hear the things/ That you wanted to hear me say/ Seen a shooting star tonight/ Slip away…. The relationship has certainly ‘slipped away’ in the past.
In many ways the song could be applied to any lost lover or friend. Some commentators have even speculated (with no real evidence) that it is Dylan’s paean to Jimi Hendrix. But the bridge section, with its imagery reminiscent of the Book of Revelation, suggests that the relationship had a more religious or spiritual connection. It may be that the apocalyptic references merely reinforce the distance between himself and his former lover. Or perhaps Dylan, staring up at the heavens, is ruminating on his broken ‘relationship’ with Jesus. He does not in any way condemn religion here, or any of its proponents. As in the hymn-like Ring Them Bells, the song is permeated by a strong sense of regret. The narrator seems to feel that he ‘failed’ in this relationship, but seems (almost entirely) certain that it is now over.
Oh Mercy provided Dylan with a relative critical and commercial success, just as he was setting out on his Never Ending Tour – a schedule of touring which would dominate the rest of his career and in which he would explore many different styles, along with hundreds of his own songs and the songs of many others. Now approaching fifty years old, despite having accumulated a huge catalogue of classic material, he was refusing to rest on his laurels. Although the album is not thought by most commentators to stand with his greatest works, it can certainly be seen, in retrospect, as the beginning of a process which would lead to him towards the evolution of a new approach to the art of song writing – a form which he himself had, on more than one occasion, contributed greatly to its reinvention.
LINKS
STILL ON THE ROAD – ALL DYLAN’S GIGS
THE CAMBRIDGE BOB DYLAN SOCIETY
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