“Murder Most Foul’s” healing litany of song, which runs from Thelonious Monk to “Dunbarton’s Drums,” may be the last word on Bob Dylan’s bean. To lift the term jazzmen coined to honor Coleman Hawkins’ knowledge of their music. (“We called him Bean [instead of ‘Egghead’]… because he was so intelligent about music…”)[1] Dylan’s own head takes in the history of America’s musical traditions. His rangy playlist in “Murder Most Foul” reminds me of all the music he’s steered me too in recent years—from Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown and Frank Sinatra’s collaborations with Gordon Jenkins, to essential tracks by Solomon Burke and John Prine. His invocation of Gallow Avenue in “Murder Most Foul” led me to the glorious chorus that comes out of nowhere on Warren Zevon’s “Desperadoes Under the Eaves” (and that, in turn, made me dig into other fine Zevon songs I’d missed such as that plain hard goof, “My Shit’s Fucked Up.”) I wouldn’t be shocked if I end up valuing Dylan’s directions to gems by other performers more than most of the songs on his new CD. But there’s at least one track on Rough and Rowdy Ways I’m sure I’ll be coming back to…
“Key West” is a keeper. Like so much of Dylan’s stuff lately, it soundtracks his endgame and his ongoing search “for love, for inspiration…
On that pirate radio station
Coming out of Luxembourg and Budapest
Radio signal, clear as can be
I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see”
Dylan means to leave this open to conflation, yet I’d bet “love” here refers not to his desire for a certain girl but to a pop lifer’s need to play that dead band’s song again. (And answer it with one of his own?) Not that women aren’t vectors of inspiration. But he’s been aware for decades his commitment to art-life rules out regular romantic progressions. (When he sings the chorus on Rough and Rowdy Ways’ “I’ve Decided to Give Myself to You”—it’s pitched to all of us who keep coming out to hear him on his never-ending tour…
“I’m giving myself to you, I am
From Salt Lake City to Birmingham
From East L.A. to San Antone
I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone”)
“Key West” is one of many recent songs in which Dylan muses on his vocation. I hear echoes of the opposing self in Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order in Key West” —that maker whose art is in but not of this world. Stevens’s poem evokes a sense of place—for him as for Dylan (and Wordsworth) scenery could be a violent stimulant[2]—but it hints an artist’s creativity distances him/her from ordinary life on this creation wherever he/she roams.
… And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Wallace Stevens’ own dailiness was famously marked by a sharp division between poetic off-hours where he indulged his “maker’s rage for order” and his prosaic nine-to-five life as an insurance company lawyer. Dylan’s bow to Stevens in “Key West” doesn’t mean he’s dumped his first literary heroes—he still places himself “on the wrong side of the railroad track/with Ginzberg, Corso, and Kerouac”—yet it hints an aesthete’s way of being seems homey to him. Like Stevens, Dylan feels the gap between moments when he’s tuned into his muse and times when he’s stuck between stations.[3]
Yet that doesn’t mean he’s down with Stevens’ solution to the problem of how to survive as a creator without patrons. Dylan, of course, has always aimed to be a popular singer as well as a singular one. Unlike Stevens, who was content to do modernism on the margins, Dylan had to suss the public aspect of his role as a performing artist even if he once bridled at being dubbed the “voice of his generation.” While he’s often sought to distance himself from “Come all ye…” finger-pointing protest songs in his back pages, he’s ok with the idea his gig might entail commentary on public matters (or “causes” to stick with a term he uses in “Key West”). That’s one reason why presidents are a presence in “Key West”—“Truman had his White House there” —and why the song preps listeners for Dylan’s spin on the Kennedy assassination in “Murder Most Foul” (the next and last song on Rough and Rowdy Ways). Dylan’s not on the verge of becoming a voters’ guide, but he’s aware you don’t become a national resource by cultivating otherworldly safe spaces. Soul-making happens in real landscapes and in our time. Dylan—who came from “a country that’s called the Midwest”—has tried to map East-West, North-South, high-low coordinates of American civ. In Rough and Rowdy Ways, that entails bringing men in exalted places down to earth. Dylan measures presidents’ humanness by embodying them. Like a poet of night stones and quick earth, he treats them as men in their moments. Or, more to the point, in “Murder Most Foul” and “Key West,” which also starts with a president’s death at the hands of an assassin (“McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled”), in their final seconds…
Dylan knows going down slow is a serious equalizer, though the republic of death has its own changeable hierarchy. Nobelists may be forgotten on the other side of the horizon line. Dylan has sometimes complained awards make him feel like a stiff. (He tends to be put out by other people’s constructs of him: “It’s like I’m stuck inside a painting / That’s hanging in the Louvre / My throat start to tickle and my nose itches / But I know that I can’t move.”) Yet it’s also true he’s long been bound for glory. “Key West” is, after all, a place to be if you’re searching for immortality.
Though that search may dovetail with a simpler desire to feel “the healing virtues of the wind…” “Key West’s” ocean breezes remind me of “Caribbean Wind.” That propulsive Dylan track from around 1980 carries the truth that romance, and a normie’s domestic life, isn’t in the cards for Dylan. There are a few versions of this song on YouTube, and the lyrics vary. I like this one (though up-and-down scale interludes after the chorus slow Dylan’s roll).[4] Dylan sings about a captivating “fair brown and blonde” Sister (who’s Haitian in another version):
“Would I have married her? I don’t know I suppose
She had bells in her braids and they hung to her toes
But I heard my mirrored destiny said to be movin’ on.
And I felt it come over me, some kind of gloom
For the sake of ‘Come on with me girl, I got plenty of room.’
But I knew I’d be lyin’ and besides she had already gone.
And that Caribbean wind still blows from Nassau to Mexico
Circle of ice to the furnace of desire.
And them busy ships of liberty on ’em iron waves so bold and free
Bringing everything that’s near to me, nearer to the fire.”
Dylan wrote the song during his Born Again years and I’d once assumed (stupidly) that fire was hellfire. Now I hear it as the fire of a maker/creator. (Of course anyone who reveres Robert Johnson as Dylan does is aware of stories where it all burns together.)
“Caribbean Wind’s” YouTube comment section has a bit of talk-back by a fan of the song (one “boxingjerapah”)—“LOL at all the people who say ‘80’s Dylan was shite’”—that jumped out at me after I read Greil Marcus’s review of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Marcus took time out at the top of his piece to bust hype about the new record and recall unwarranted praise Dylan got during a period that (in Marcus’s mind) stretched from the album Street Legal(1978) until Dylan released a pair of redemptive folk covers albums in the 90s. Marcus’s disdain for late 70s/80s Dylan is old news and I’m not sure it makes sense to engage him on this score. After all, there’s no doubt Dylan made some lame records after 1975. (Just as he did between 1969 and 1974).[5]
I wouldn’t urge anyone to take another pass at Down in the Groove or Real Life or Under the Blood Red Sky. And since Dylan’s catalogue is so vast, listeners can afford to miss songs like “Changing of the Guards” or “What Can I Do For You” or “Tight Connection to My Heart” from other less than middling Dylan albums. OTOH, why does Marcus go out of his way to align himself with another critic’s drive-by trashing of that tour de force “Brownsville Girl.” No critic who cares about Dylan’s legacy should deflect listeners from this long road song (released in 1987) about Beat paths and our hero’s own journey.
The brilliance of “Brownsville Girl,” a song which anticipates so many of Dylan’s post-millennial moves, is how it manages to get fresh about feeling old hat. Dylan teasingly invokes his own persona—“the only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t really Henry Porter”—as well as episodes in his private and public life (“we got him cornered in the churchyard”). Dylan’s always been one of the traveling kind—“I didn’t know whether to duck or run, so I ran”—but by the mid-80s (as he’d write in his memoir, Chronicles) his old songs were weighing him down like a “package of heavy rotting meat.” He felt like “an old actor fumbling in garbage cans outside the theater of past triumphs.” In the time-drenched “Brownsville Girl,” Gregory Peck’s transformation from young gun/star (in the late 40s flic The Gunfighter) to clunky icon stands in for the almost unfathomable mutation in Dylan’s pop persona. After years of never being boring, Dylan seemed to preside over a descent into blankness: “I don’t know what’s it about. But I’ll go see him in anything. I’ll stand in line.” But Dylan wasn’t just taking up space in “Brownsville Girl.” It’s some of the best acting he’s ever done on record. And you don’t have to take my word for it. A few years back, Dylan brought up “Brownsville Girl” when he was asked if there were any songs of his he thought deserved more play.
I don’t know why Marcus insists on dissing “Brownsville Girl.” It’s not at odds with the notion Dylan spent of lot of the 80s down in the slough, though its high comic grandeur does make it harder to dismiss a decade (or more) of Dylan as…shite.[6]
I hope Marcus realizes his stubborn unresponsiveness to what’s most vital in Dylan’s 80s output is unworthy of his best critical self. He’s not like his late friend Pauline Kael who claimed she never watched a movie twice. Marcus’s mind isn’t like concrete. He’s not afraid to change an opinion. After he reviewed Rough and Rowdy Ways, for example, he allowed the record was growing on him. He implied he might have made a mistake when he treated its songs as discrete things rather than as components of a larger entity with a thru-line. Not that he’s backed off his first thought that there’s a pit in the middle of the record. I hear the same “trough of dead air” there. (“Key West” is, by contrast, full of quiet life.) I also dig Marcus’s negative if nuanced take on Dylan’s morally iffy failure to credit the song beneath “False Prophet.” There’s no acknowledgement on Rough and Rowdy Ways that Dylan lifted the melody and arrangement for that track from a 50s R&B song, “If Lovin’ is Believing,” by Billie Emerson. Dylan’s rip-off in this instance was even more blatant than the act of larceny behind “Soon After Midnight” (on his last album of originals, Tempest), which is based on Bobby Fuller’s “A New Shade of Blue.”
When it comes to Dylan’s thefts and loves, maybe payback in kind is the way to go, per Dylan’s old collaborator Mark Knopfler. Last month, before I heard Rough and Rowdy Ways, my favorite new Dylan song was “Lights of Taormina”—a track on Knopfler’s solo record, Tracker, which I’d missed when it came out in 2016. “Lights of Taormina” slows down (and slightly enhances) the melody of Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” Knopfler, FWIW, claims full compositional credit. (He’s not worried Dylan will call Saul!)
I’m still so in love with “Taormina” I can hardly see, yet I don’t know if I’d take it over “Key West” now. Then again, who must choose? You certainly don’t have to. And I hope you fit both destinations into your summer soundscape.
Notes
1 He nods to European classical music a few times on Rough and Rowdy Ways too, but I doubt he’ll serve as my or your guide to that cultural corpus.
2 “Key West’s” name-checks of tropical flowers—one dangerous breed, in particular—wafted me back to “Caribbean Wind’s” lines about a pimpish adversary: “Couples were dancing and I lost track of the hours / He was well prepared, I knew he was / Paying attention like a rattlesnake does / When he’s hearin’ footsteps tramplin’ over his flowers.”
3 I believe Dylan did this live version of “Caribbean Wind” at the request of the late music writer Paul Williams, but before he started the song, he spoke with feeling about a larger figure in (Southern) American musical culture, Alan Lomax.
4 Here’s the chorus of Dylan’s 80s song “I and I”: “In creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives / I and I / One say to the other, no man sees my face and lives.” That seems on point. As are dilemmas of a cartoon character who gave Dylan a pseudonym he’s used in notes on his CDs for decades now—“produced by Jack Frost.” In the 1979 Disney flic, Jack Frost (voiced, in an odd choice, by Vegas comic Buddy Hackett) yearns to be human when he falls for a beautiful girl next door, but he’s doomed to remain a lovable freak not a marriage prospect. If you’re amused at the notion of Dylan squeezing sparks out of Buddy Hackett and Wally Stevens—go ahead and laugh. While Dylan has been known to stand on his dignity, you heard the man (per the second single from Rough and Rowdy Ways): “I contain multitudes.”
5 My own first whiff of “Dylan is back” crap dates back to New Morning which had only one track, “Sign on a Window,” I needed to hear more than a couple times. Self Portrait, which preceded it, was another less than urgent set of songs. Christopher Ricks’ line about the lyric of one of the few memorable tracks on that record still seems right on. Ricks suggested “All the tired horses in the sun / how am I gonna get any ridin’ done”—imaged Dylan’s (relative) lack of inspiration around this time. Marcus, by the way, was hard on Self Portrait when it came out, asking “What is this shit?” But he’s not stuck on that old opinion. He wrote liner notes for the rejiggered version of Self Portrait, released in 2017, which included lost-and-found tracks like “Pretty Saro” where swooning, crooning Dylan hit high notes in honor of his wife. I’m with Marcus when it comes to the re-visioned Self Portrait.
6 Marcus keeps hammering on about Dylan’s awful 80s. A few weeks ago, he responded to an “Ask Greil” query about Infidels (1983) by insisting the album “isn’t worth anyone’s time.” He’s allowed he’s fond of one song, “Blind Willie McTell,” recorded during the Infidels’ sessions. “BWT” didn’t make the cut for Infidels and came out on an official bootleg collection in the early 90s. That near solo version of the song, with Dylan playing piano and Mark Knopfler barely there on guitar, doesn’t sound much like the rest of Infidels. As it happens, though, there’s a great Stones-y version with Mick Taylor on slide guitar that would’ve fit the sound on that album. (This bootleg track is up now on YouTube here though it’s been taken down a few times in the past.) I linked Marcus to it about 10 years ago (and wrote about it here.) He was wowed back then: “There’s nothing like it.” But the song went down his memory hole. In that last “Ask Greil” take-down of Infidels, he slagged another full band version of “BWT”: “the track left off the album is a big, over-orchestrated, over-done, lumbering dead elephant of a recording.” Haven’t heard that, but I checked in with Marcus to make sure he wasn’t referring to the one with Mick Taylor he once thought was terrific. He confirmed he’d forgotten about that version. Light stuff? Sure. Still, I’m thinking Marcus might think twice about why he’s so well-defended when it comes to Dylan’s best music from the 80s. And that includes much of what got put down during those Infidels sessions. This video of Dylan with the Infidels band (which included Sly and Robbie as well as Knopfler and Taylor) hints at how much fun those guys were having as they made music that was a deep far from worthless.