Changing of the Guards
The Dylan train rolls on into the late '70s. Instead of posting regular updates on this project, I've decided to pack as much into each one to, uhm, minimize self-indulgence and audience tedium.
The first time I listened to Blood on the Tracks in earnest was in the late winter of 1999. I was downloading things of that ilk at the time (back in the wild west of FTP, before file sharing grew up and became a criminal) and I burned a copy to take along on an unexpected spring break trip to Austria. I remember playing "Tangled Up in Blue" for my exciting new girlfriend when she stopped by my hostel room one morning before work. It was one of the CDs that I listened to as I wandered around Vienna, stuffing myself on Lindt chocolates and seeing the sights that I thought I was supposed to see.
It is a testament to the album's versatility that I was able to listen to it at that time. After all, it's one of the most famous breakup albums of all time and I was walking on the clouds of my new love. One of my favorite things about the album is how, despite being written from turmoil, it manages to tell the whole story of love from the intoxicating beginning to the (sometimes) painful end. And they are beautiful stories, stories of life, because above all they are honest and real, uplifting and heartbreaking. This duality carries over into other interpretive aspects as well. Dylan toys with the perspective, going back and forth between the first and third person, to tell a story that sounds personal but has the occasional advantage of the omniscient narrator. This tool is also used to weave personal circumstances in and out of the narrative, making the songs alternately timeless and grounded in the present.
What can I say? It would be hard for this album to be any better. Plus I've got a memory of it associated with my girl. It will live in my mind forever.
Live 1975 is everything that I had hoped Before the Flood would be—joyous interpretations of the music in an intimate setting energized by palpable musical camaraderie. Some of the older material is spectacularly reimagined ("It Ain't Me, Babe", "A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fail"), some more subtly but no less beautifully so ("Simple Twist of Fate"). The previously unreleased stuff ("Mama, You Been on My Mind", "I Shall Be Released") is good, but the new stuff off Desire is smoking. The album wasn't released until after the tour but it had been marinating with the band for over six months and it shows.
My only mistake was listening to Live 1975 before Desire, which I did in the interest of historical accuracy, because some of the originals are less spirited than the live versions. It's still a fantastic album, though. More than any other, I felt like Desire transported me to a new world with each song, to the Old West of Mexico in "Romance in Durango" or a little island on the brink of destruction in "Black Diamond Bay." Scarlett Rivera and Emmylou Harris bring so much magic to this album, it's easy to get lost in the imagined worlds.
I've been trying to put to words my reasons for undertaking this little Dylan experiment, the sequential listening and writing. It's something more than liking the music and respecting the man, something about living his journey that I have a hard time pinning down. But in the course of thinking about this, I also tried to list my reasons for respecting him (outside of "makes good music") and "Sara" encompasses a lot of it. I know that there are things in my life that can't help but to overtake everything I am and to deny them that would be to be untrue to myself. Throughout Dylan's career, he never denied himself that—whatever he was at the moment, that's what his music was: idealistic (The Times They Are A-Changin'), happily domesticated (Planet Waves), in turmoil (Blood on the Tracks), converting to Christianity (Slow Train Coming), etc. "Sara" is a shining example of this tradition, so beautifully bittersweet even without the context of his personal life, and a song that cemented my respect for him.
And that brings us to Street Legal, the precursor to Dylan's conversion to Christianity and the '80s, and completely uncharted territory for me. For the first time, the music sounds dated, a product of the time in which it was created rather than transcending it. It feels overproduced, especially the drums and horns. After accepting early on that this wasn't going to be my favorite album musically, I tried to look deeper to determine if it was the songs or the production and performance that was bothering me. It didn't take long to realize that the songs are as good as ever and describe an interesting transition in his life. This verse from "Changing of the Guards" always comes to mind:
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 brace yourself for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.
Most of the love songs have a twist that hints at a darker side beneath the well-intentioned words, although I'm still fighting that urge on "Is Your Love in Vain?" and maintaining that it's a beautiful hymn to the all-or-nothing nature of love, that minus maturity, commitment or gravity it's nothing but a waste of "precious time".
Next stop, the conversion to Christianity and the much-maligned music that followed. As always, I'm waiting to find something I don't like and I haven't been let down yet.