…Everybody got to wonder
What’s the matter with this cruel world today…
MODERN TIMES begins, as it ends, in an apocalyptic landscape. The earth itself is in tumult. Volcanoes, hurricanes and whirlwinds scour the land. The power is cut. It’s like Hell’s Kitchen. Everything is broken. Hot stuff everywhere. For the singer, the writing is on the wall. He’s already offered up some prayers. Now he has to clear out of town fast.
Soon it will be morning. He grabs his trombone and blows. He’s driving north, his eyes blinded by tears. Rain lashes the windscreen. He grabs the steering wheel in fury. The images almost overwhelm him. A beautiful face flashes in front of his eyes. A vision of perfection. He licks his lips around the name…. A young singer. Alicia KEYS…. perhaps she will be the key, his salvation. He keeps his eyes open for her all through Tennessee. He will devote himself to her. He wants a REAL GOOD woman who will obey him. And he will find her. He will never betray her, even when he stands before God. Now the sun is shining, almost blinding him. ….
But he doesn’t need a map. He already knows where he’s going. He begins to fantasise. He will raise himself an army. The toughest sons of bitches. They will ravage the countryside. And God, of course is on his side.
A conversation is going on in his head. Between a man and a woman. Maybe it’s still Alicia, maybe not. Maybe it’s a demon, talking to an angel. God conversing with the Devil. And after all, you gotta serve somebody…
His fantasies become lascivious. He’s got the porkchops, she got the pie. Ha ha ha. Slaver slaver, drool drool…. But she won’t play ball. She cries SHAME on his wickedness. SHAME on his evil schemes.
The elements coverwhelm him. The demon takes the form of a whirlwind bearing down on him. Something bad’s gonna happen. He panics. Like everyone else, he wants to leave the country. Maybe if he keeps driving he’ll reach Canada. Then he can become a farmer. He’ll renounce the demon. Put down his pitchfork. Lay down his hammer. Finally he hears her pitiless voice, telling him he ought to take pity on himself.
It doesn’t sound as if his sins are going to be redeemed…
MODERN TIMES is, as a number of commentators have already commented, an ironic title. Dylan’s album is couched in the musical and lyrical language of the pre-war blues, Western swing and crooning styles. Like an old-time musical entertainer, he switches between styles smoothly. You can almost see him up there, twirling his cane, a glint in his eye. There is a reference, if you like, to Chaplin’s balletic masterpiece of the same name, the last gasp of the great poetic art of silent movies. Chaplin’s film railed against modern styles and modern life, showing technology dwarfing the scale of humanity. And Chaplin’s film was made in the late 30s, as the world moved inexorably, stupidly, lumbering towards a great apocalyptic cataclysm. In his next film Chaplin became Hitler himself. Dicing with the Devil. And so it is with Dylan’s new album, which could be subtitled ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall‘… Great title, but it’s been used before. Like Chaplin, Dylan sees the only response to the coming cataclysm in mocking humour.
Dylan’s previous album, LOVE AND THEFT, was released – spookily – on September 11th 2001. Already the portents were present. High Water flooded the earth. In Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum Dylan wrote, in six short words, the best description of war ever: …Two Big Bags Of Dead Men’s Bones... In the years since its release, war and paranoia have increased around us daily. Those big bags have overflowed. And in Washington, where in THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN the ladies are ‘scrambling to get out of town’, America’s leaders kneel and pray. Our own lovely Tony Blair kneels with Bush to be reassured that God is on their side. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.
Nothing fires Dylan up more than hypocrisy, especially in those early protest songs (‘Even Jesus would never forgive what you do!’- Masters of War) and again in the songs of his so-called ‘born again’ period. Time and time again he warns us that the Hard Rain is falling. The Hard Rain, he tells us, is LIES. And now, on MODERN TIMES, he reaches back into the soul of America, of the modern world. Often, as with LOVE AND THEFT, we are in the 1920s. At other times we go further back, to the American Civil War. On stage Dylan dresses like a Confederate dandy, a riverboat gambler out of Huckleberry Finn. In Chronicles he tells us how relevant the Civil War is to the condition of America today. Dylan has said that he wants his songs to STOP TIME. The Times, he once sang, Are A-Changin’. When he sings that song now it’s a slow lament, a recognition of universal processes. In LOVE AND THEFT and MODERN TIMES he takes us a trip on a kind of magic swirling time machine. One moment we’re in the 1930s, next moment we’re meeting Alicia Keys or getting ready for a ‘bootie call’. We’re seeing the present through a prism of the past. Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast, he sang in SILVIO, from his unlamented late 80s low point DOWN IN THE GROOVE. And he kept singing that song. Seen better days, he would drawl, but who has not…
THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN has one of the greatest openings to any Dylan album. Appropriately, there is a roll of drums. A guitarist picks out a blues groove. There is a pause, just for a millisecond, so we can draw breath. Then the whole band kicks in. Of course, we’ve heard the tune before. It’s the speeded up blues lick that Chuck Berry used for JOHNNY B. GOODE, his apocryphal tale about a boy with a guitar who heads for the big city. Chuck liked the tune so much he used it on a lot of his other records. Its unlikely he invented it, though. Nearly all of the blues is handed down through time from God knows where. On MODERN TIMES Dylan steals liberally, both musically and lyrically, from many sources, just like all the great bluesmen did. The band plays it cool. They are tight, unfussy. The relative flashiness of guitarists like Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell is gone. These guys – Kimball, Freeman, Herron, Garnier, Recile – are Men In Grey – they play together like they’ve been doing it nearly every night for a year (which of course they have). The groove they set up is relaxed and smoothy, allowing Bob’s vocal variations to make the song flow. And what a voice he has now. You can hear it in the gigs he’s been playing in 2006. The characteristic Dyan rasp is still there, but now it’s modulated by a deceptive sweetness of tone, achieved by Bob’s clandestine study of the crooners of the 30s and 40s. In his early years he sang in a deliberately alienating nasal drawl. He forced you to listen to the words. Made you sit in your seat and wouldn’t let you dance. Now you can dance to all Bob’s music. Finally he has achieved his ambition, as stated in his callow youth, to ‘carry himself like Big Joe Williams’.
BIG JOE WILLIAMS
For the first few verses, he is as cool and detached as his musicians. Occasionally the voice threatens to break, as when he pronounces ‘waaall’ in the third verse. He even sounds pretty cool about Alicia, innocently baffled by her presence in the song. There is a musical break, allowing the band to stretch out. When he sings ‘Remember this, I’m your servant both night and day’ he sounds quite calm, self-assured. But when he comes to ‘I want some real good woman to do just what I say’ he wobbles a little.
The next musical break steps the tempo up a little. He sounds hopeful, cheerful even, belying the tension in the words, his voice lifting at the ends of lines… …some sweet day I’ll stand before my KING…. he lilts. Then, as he threatens to raise an army and stages his lustful conversation, his voice becomes rougher, more caustic. In the final section he sounds rueful, still with that glint of humility in his voice until the music dissolves in a classic blues crescendo, finally returning us to the guitar flourish it began with.
THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN is a moral drama. Or a moral maze. The narrator seems to be one who has few moral boundaries. It’s with great relish that he declares, in the song’s most audacious extrapolation of traditional blues imagery …I’VE SUCKED THE MILK OUT OF A THOUSAND COWS… In the blues such imagery is usually related to a kind of frustrated sexuality, as in Robert Johnson’s MILK COW BLUES (covered by the young Elvis and the young Dylan). But here we feel that the narrator has sucked the lifeblood out of Mother Earth herself. The singer may have said his religious vows, but he seems like a potential mass murderer. All around him the Earth seems to be erupting in chaos. But only the voice of the female figure he is pursuing seems to bring him down to earth. In the end he promises to lay his ‘pitchfork’ and his ‘hammer’ down for her, but there is no escape, in this chaotic landscape, for the confusion he has wrought. The last words are pure acid: …For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself!… There seems little chance that he will.
A different version of this text appears in DETERMINED TO STAND: THE REINVENTION OF BOB DYLAN
DYLAN LINKS
DAILY DYLAN NEWS at the wonderful EXPECTING RAIN
THE BOB DYLAN PROJECT- COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS
STILL ON THE ROAD – ALL DYLAN’S GIGS
THE CAMBRIDGE BOB DYLAN SOCIETY
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Extract from ‘DETERMINED TO STAND’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest
As chaos takes over we return to our friend Leo, who can now make no sense of what is happening in this bizarre, hallucinatory scenario: …Leo turned to Cleo/ “I think I’m going mad”/ But he’d lost his mind already/ Whatever mind he had… We are never told who ‘Cleo’ is. Meanwhile the description of Leo trying to …block the doorway to save all those from harm/ Blood from an open wound pouring down his arm… seems to be a version of the scenes in the movie where Jack performs heroics in order to save some of the passengers. But this is the last we will hear of Leo and we will never find out whether he shares Jack Dawson’s fate. In the next verse we hear that: …Petals fell from the flowers/ ‘Till all of them were gone/ In the long and dreadful hours/ The wizard’s curse played on… The mention of the ‘wizard’s curse’ suggests that this dream-version of the sinking of the ship is indeed a kind of Hollywood movie in which the passengers have been bewitched by an unseen manipulator. Given that the trouble with the ship appears to have been started by a whirlwind, perhaps this ‘remake’ of the famous movie has somehow incorporated elements of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends are however, nowhere to be seen.
PODCAST: BOB DYLAN: A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season Three 22) Twisted Love Songs from ‘Street Legal’
Please click ‘Watch on you tube’ LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE, thanks !!! EXTRACTS Read the full text HERE Street Legal was a rather ‘schizophrenic’ album. Four of its nine songs- Changing of the Guards, No Time To Think, Senor and Where Are You Tonight revive the kind of arcane symbolism that Dylan had been so fond of in the mid-1960s, as well as displaying his new found interest in mysticism – especially with regard to the symbolism of the Tarot pack. The other five songs might be called ‘twisted love songs’. Love songs have always formed an important part of...
BOB DYLAN’S JUST LIKE TOM THUMB’S BLUES: …HOWLING AT THE MOON…
…My only pair of trousers had a big hole. Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes As I went along. My inn was at the Big Dipper. —My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound… Arthur Rimbaud, My Bohemian Life …My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale… …Straight ahead lay the distant lights of El Paso and Juarez, sown in a tremendous valley so big that you could see several railroads...
PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas SeasonThree 21) Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
LILY, ROSEMARY AND THE JACK OF HEARTS EXTRACTS FULL TEXT HERE This is one of Dylan’s most appealing and enigmatic songs, full of witty rhyming, various poetic devices and characteristically colloquial turns of phrase. Like The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest (its most obvious antecedent) it is a comic narrative which can be interpreted in many different ways. As with other songs on Blood on the Tracks, we are not certain whether the story in the song is told chronologically. Only certain selected details aryyyy212presented, as if we are watching a movie shot in the style of...
PODCAST: BOB DYLAN: A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season Three 20) It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue: Take What You Have Gathered…
Please click ‘Watch on You Tube’ and Like and subscribe COMMENTS WELCOME EXTRACTS … READ FULL TEXT HERE It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue is one of Bob Dylan’s most well known songs. It has a beautiful melody, a winning chorus and lyrics that can express many different moods. Dylan has performed it almost five hundred times and there are literally hundreds of cover versions. It presents us with a series of images which could be said to change meaning depending on whether the song is performed wistfully, angrily or with a sense of acceptance. In some ways...
BOB DYLAN’S SENOR: CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE WE’RE HEADING?
he narrator appears to be asking ‘Senor’ about the destiny of the world, which is presumably under the control of ‘Yankee power’.
PODCAST: BOB DYLAN: A HEADFUL OF IDEAS Season Three 19) Brownsville Girl: If There’s an Original Thought Out There…
EXTRACTS (Full text HERE) Brownsville Girl is an extraordinarily experimental song which is a unique amalgam of lyrical, cinematic and theatrical elements. Its use of fractured internal and external narratives and time frames links it to earlier songs like Tangled Up in Blue and Visions of Johanna. But it uses language in a very different way. The lyrics were co-written with leading American playwright and actor Sam Shepard. Part sung and part spoken, it mixes startling poetic imagery with prosaic and clichéd expressions in what is often a highly disarming manner. The music follows a basic pattern of rhythmic repetition,...
PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 18) Motorpsycho Nitemare: A Clean Cut Kid
PLEASE CLICK ON ‘WATCH ON YOU TUBE’ PLEASE LIKER AND SUBSCRIBE! COMMENTS WELCOME ON YOU TUBE OR FURTHER DOWN THIS PAGE EXTRACTS (full version here) Motorpsycho Nitemare is a comic ‘shaggy dog’ story that appears on what is generally regarded as Dylan’s first ‘post protest’ album, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). Motorpsycho Nitemare represents a kind of bridge between the comic political and social commentary of Dylan’s early ‘talkin’ blues’ songs and the surreal landscapes of satirical pieces like Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, Subterranean Homesick Blues, Tombstone Blues and Desolation Row. It is also the first Dylan song to...
BOB DYLAN’S LOVE SONGS OF THE MID-1960s (Part Two)
Several very distinctive love songs that Dylan composed around this time never made it onto his official albums, although these songs did tend to get ‘snapped up’ by other musicians. If You Gotta Go, Go Now is a light hearted romp which, like I Don’t Believe You, is based around a sexual encounter. As such it received several airplay bans. The song was a regular feature of Dylan’s final acoustic tours. It features on Live 64, The Bootleg Series recording of the 1964 Philadelphia Halloween show. Many of these early performances were accompanied by audience laughter. The song was...
BOB DYLAN’S LOVE SONGS OF THE MID-1960S: IT USED TO GO LIKE THIS… (Part One)
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head…. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 O my Luve is like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve is like the melody That’s sweetly played in tune… Robert Burns A Red, Red Rose In the early 1960s, Bob Dylan was an extremely prolific writer, producing so much quality material that much of it would...
PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 17) New Morning: A Pastoral Dream (Part Two)
PLEASE VIEW ON YOU TUBE. LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! EXTRACTS FULL TEXT HERE NEW MORNING…. A PASTORAL DREAM With his tongue very firmly in his cheek, and using a vocal delivery similar to the ‘softened’ Nashville Skyline tone, Dylan depicts a ‘winter wonderland’ while confessing his love to a girl called ‘Winterlude’, who he refers to as …darlin…, …my little apple… and then …my little daisy… cranking up the corniness as he rhymes these terms of endearment with …no quarrelin’… , …chapel… and …lazy… He clearly delights in this feast of self parodic humour. Lines like …you’re the one I adore/...
PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas season Three 16)New Morning: A Pastoral Dream (Part One)
Chris Gregory examines the dreamy world of 1970's NEW MORNING
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