Month: October 2014

Bob Dylan – Self Portrait

Self Portrait

Bob Dylan – Self Portrait Columbia C2X 30050 (1970)

Now’s here’s a Bob Dylan album that is decidedly half-baked.  Dylan himself has shrugged it off as a joke on his over-eager fans, meant to deflate their expectations of him.  But it’s hard to believe much of what Dylan says about himself and his work.  Looking at this sprawling double-LP, it distinctly looks like about four different projects crammed together.  Some of the songs seem to carry forward the country sounds of Nashville Skyline, with an old-timey focus that also echoes John Wesley Harding.  Other songs seem almost like demos for his upcoming New Morning album, with smooth yet elaborate sounds that fit into the ongoing California singer-songwriter movement.  There also are some poorly recorded live tracks from Dylan’s appearance headlining the 1969 Isle of Wight festival.  Lastly, some of the songs seem to chart an alternate path from New Morning by presenting an orchestrated version of more traditional folk music (kind of like Pete Seeger with strings, horns and backing singers).  Through it all, there are many cover songs, and the relatively few new compositions feature almost no lyrics–typically just repeating a few short verses or even lacking any words at all.

This album was poorly received.  One possible explanation is that this was really something of a vault-clearing, odds-and-ends collection of demos, outtakes and leftover live recordings, but was marketed as just another new Dylan album.  The result was a mismatch of expectations–intended or not.  Maybe no one could have expected the reaction, because those kinds of vault-clearing albums weren’t exactly commonplace in rock and pop music yet, though there certainly were precedents in jazz, for instance.

The best material here is scattered and all over the place.  To find the modicum of decent material you have to slog through a lot of what seem like half-finished songs, boring and uninspired–like “Days of 49,” which could almost have been a John Wesley Harding reject.  “All the Tired Horses” is nice because its one of the more successful songs here that breaks from what Dylan has done elsewhere.  A few other songs like “Alberta #1” and “Wigwam” are decent too.  Listening to this end-to-end is something much more like work than pleasure.  Most listeners will want to ignore this one entirely.

Bob Dylan – Down in the Groove

Down in the Groove

Bob Dylan – Down in the Groove Columbia CK 40957 (1988)

A tedious and painful listening experience.  When Bob Dylan is lazy or just uninspired he always leans on the blues.  He does so a fair amount here.  While he worked it out better with the simpler World Gone Wrong a few years later, here the glitzy and grandiose 1980s production suffocates any possibilities.  Not that there really are many possibilities.  “Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street)” might be the best offering, which is not saying much.  This is a leading contender for the ignoble title of “worst Bob Dylan album.”  Really, it’s embarrassing.

Bob Dylan – New Morning

New Morning

Bob Dylan – New Morning Columbia KC 30290  (1970)

“If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing, even badly . . . .” William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1983).

Some claim New Morning was relevant at the time.  And I suppose it does show an interest in the West-Coast singer-songwriter movement.  “Day of the Locusts,” with its grand, booming piano parts, is probably the best example of how this album sets aim for a more lush, orchestrated and dramatic sound than almost anything else Dylan had done before.  But what I hear as well are too many songs comparable to second-rate Grateful Dead material from that band’s country-rock phase (“Went to See the Gypsy,” “New Morning”), half-baked novelty concepts (“Winterlude,” “If Dogs Run Free” [the birth of Tom Waits‘ career?]) and lots of songs with very poor vocals — even by Dylan’s typically low standards in that department.  This does, however, mark a turning point where Dylan’s lyrics became more personal, and for a change he is more focused on his own life in what seems like a fairly direct manner — he’s not just singing impersonal or abstract material in the first person.  He’s also willing to show more vulnerability here than he would for decades, if ever.  Purely in hindsight, though, this album is just too inconsistent to impress, even if there are a few good tunes here and there (“If Not for You,” “The Man in Me”).  But, I still feel like rooting for Bob on this one, even when things go wrong, which they do more often than not, because he’s stepping out of his comfort zone and trying something different.

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline

Nashville Skyline

Bob Dylan – Nashville Skyline Columbia KCS 9825 (1969)

It is almost a cliché for pop musicians of a certain vintage not normally associated with country music to release a “country” album.  The timing is always when their sales are declining and they are on the long downward slope that almost inevitably afflicts their careers as they leave behind their best years as artists.  One sobering truth about the pop music business is that the vast majority of acts have only about five to ten years or so of genuine relevance — if they are lucky to have any relevance at all.  Sure, there are exceptions, but taking a large enough step backwards the trend is unmistakable.  Yet the allure of doing a “country” album is great enough that it is one of those thing that seems inevitable for long-running acts.  The first major artist to really do it was Ray Charles with Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.  The Byrds did it with Sweetheart of the Rodeo too.  Even decades later, Elvis Costello did it with Almost Blue, Frank Black did it with Honeycomb, etc.  Nashville Skyline was Dylan’s foray into full-fledged country music — he had recorded in Nashville before, but he wasn’t pursuing country music then.  The reasons Dylan or anyone else would make a record like this are many-fold.  There is usually some crass motive to find cross-over success (reach new demographics and potential new sales!).  Sometimes it’s just a self-indulgence that past success has enabled (always loved country music but didn’t have the credentials or label support to make it happen before, here is a chance for a vanity project!).  Or it could even be slumming (oooh, making a country album would be something different and exotic!).  Other times, it’s just desperation (writer’s block and creative dead-ends…hmm, well, why not a country album?).  It’s become something a little more shocking for a non-country artist to make country music in the Unites States, given the social context of modern times.  Popular country music, from the countrypolitan era onward, has really severed many ties from its origins in folk music.  It’s often a campy self-parody that talks down to its listeners.  Add to that the fact that urban middle-class liberals tend to harbor great hostility toward “rednecks” (the rural poor) and even blue-collar types (the urban working class) and it is the “rednecks” and some of the urban working class that are the core audience of modern country music.

So where do Bob Dylan and his Nashville Skyline fit into all this?  For many, this was the album that marked the beginning of the end for Dylan.  His early years showed him to be a talented but not iconoclastic folk singer.  He stayed within the bounds of that tradition.  But then he went electric, shocking and appalling many narrow-minded folkies, and in doing so his songwriting adopted the currency of the beat generation.  It was this mid-Sixties period that made Bob Dylan into a cultural icon.  But by the end of the decade, and after his motorcycle crash, he was largely done with his beat-poet songwriting.  John Wesley Harding presented a slightly different type of songwriting, built more around mythology and simpler, less literary forms.  But traces of his earlier styles remained.  This, his next album, would be a kind of break, looking into completely new areas for a new style of songwriting.*  Dylan looked to country music.

This is an effective album, even if it’s not littered with classic songs.  The re-make of “Girl From the North Country” sung with Johnny Cash and “Lay Lady Lay” are the standouts (in spite of Dylan and Cash singing different lyrics at one point in their duet).  But the rest is still quite good.  This is no Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde, but what is?  Dylan certainly had no hostility to the working class, and even proved to have a very conservative affinity to it that confused many who labelled him a countercultural revolutionary.  The key to this album is that Dylan wasn’t just slumming.  He had a genuine appreciation for country music.  It may not be his forte exactly, but he manages to demonstrate some versatility.   The bad news in all this is that this was just the first instance of Dylan flapping in the wind for the next many years trying out new things — without really sticking with any — and generally just losing touch with his strengths as a songwriter.  But what happened later should not tarnish this album, which is quite good despite falling short of being a major classic.  And while this feels a tad escapist, like Dylan trying to cheer himself up with a dose of music he had long appreciated from a distance, well, he makes a convincing go of it.

*My hypothesis is that celebrity-status Dylan didn’t read as much poetry anymore and lost touch with that element.

Jack White – Lazaretto

Lazaretto

Jack White – Lazaretto XL/Third Man XLCD 645 (2014)

So, bear with me.  Listen to Lazaretto.  Then, wonder whether Jack White has become a kind of “angry white man” caricature, a sort of pathetic, misogynistic, hapless, self-important, delusional wreck hiding behind a tried-and-true Libertarian (with a capital “L”) artifice, or at least that he has intensely focus-grouped the album to appeal to the teenage boy version of said Libertarian caricature.  I said, bear with me.  Isn’t this exactly what “Entitlement” and “Want and Able” are about?  Even “Alone In My Home” too?  These songs are about the proud Individual not being “told what to do”, complaining about people having what they aren’t “able” to get for themselves, and wanting to be recused from interaction with so much of the world while isolated in his private castle/”home”.  And isn’t this exactly what a retro sort of sound appeals to as well…the fading glory of the white patriarchal society?  It is more than a little ironic that White trades in “blues rock” riffs mostly, because it isn’t black America that fuels Libertarian politics.  But he connects with black America only through a patriarchal view of the world, as can be seen from the opener “Three Women,” an adaptation of a Blind Willie McTell tune, full of boastful machismo about more or less being able to possess women — albeit stripped of the original’s slightly militant miscegenation. This fits entirely with White’s public persona, wearing a sharkskin suit on the cover.

The sound of this album is ornate, to say the least.  Every song is polished up with the kind gilding that dominates Donald Trump buildings (the analogy holds in more ways than one).  The elaborate, densely layered recordings of such nonsense songs seems like a gaudy display of decadence, proving to anyone who listens that White is a successful and wealthy musician who can summon the resources to make an album in a manner so time-consuming.  Still, occasionally, it works, like on “Would You Fight For My Love?” there is a line, “You have to want to stop being alone,” when the singing suddenly drops into a spoken monotone, which completely turns the song around and arrests all its momentum to focus on that lyric.  It’s effective.  But a lot of this album seems like little more than smoke and mirrors.  Yes, White knows how to craft a record.  He can call up all sorts of devices to make a point.  But many of these seem like little more than tricks.  They are vacuously applied to these songs, which don’t amount to much more than raw space for the gimmickry.  Lazaretto is a platform for Jack White to try to display his encyclopedic knowledge of by-gone musical trends, and argue that he’s really better than you, the listener, in doing so.  What emerges is that he probably is a better guitar player than most of us listeners, but that isn’t really his focus here, and the rest of what he does focus on comes across as overcompensation for some deep-seated personal insecurity.

Bob Dylan – Good As I Been to You

Good As I Been to You

Bob Dylan – Good As I Been to You Columbia CK 53200 (1992)

This one edged out Empire Burlesque and Knocked Out Loaded as having the most horrible album cover to grace a Bob Dylan album — was the cover photo taken right after Dylan woke up in a homeless shelter?  Nonetheless, this collection of solo renditions of traditional folk songs works quite well.  Dylan is surprisingly invested in the material.  The selection of songs is good, like a page out of the Carter Family songbook or Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (and “Frankie & Albert” the opener is best known for appearing on the Anthology as “Frankie,” performed by Mississippi John Hurt, though Lead Belly recorded it as “Frankie and Albert” too).  This was the right time in his career to make this album too.  He had a lifetime of listening to folk music to pick just the right ones to record, and with the benefit of advancing years he can perform them simply and faithfully and still sound convincing.  It might not be a major achievement, but Dylan would not ever make another album better than this for the rest of his career.

Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong

World Gone Wrong

Bob Dylan – World Gone Wrong Columbia CK 57590 (1993)

Although no one could have guessed it at the time, World Gone Wrong in a large part set the tone for much of the rest of Dylan’s career.  His albums from Time Out of Mind until his late-career switch of a standards crooner — especially Together Through Life — rely heavily on an electrified version of the simple blues forms that coalesced here.  This just doesn’t work as well as the folk styled Good as I Been to You though, even if this one is engineered much better.  These are grim tunes, stripped of the deeply weird and unpredictable elements of that prior collection of folk.  Playing the blues Dylan tends to sound lazy.  “Delia” is still nice.

I may be in the minority, but I think this is no better (or worse) than what you could hear from a street musician busking with old blues and folk tunes.  It’s one of those albums that kind of drifts by without taking any big chances, without opening up and risking exposing vulnerabilities.  Instead it pares down the thematic range to almost a monotone.  But it plays into expectations.  So in perfunctory fashion it delivers what it advertises.  That seems to be why “Dylan bores” like this album.  And it fulfilled Dylan’s existing contract to Columbia with minimal effort on his part.  Moving on then…

Elizabeth Cotten – Folksongs and Instrumentals With Guitar

Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar

Elizabeth Cotten – Folksongs and Instrumentals With Guitar Folkways FG 3526 (1958)

Elizabeth Cotten was an excellent guitar player, and a self-taught one.  Her playing seemed to completely be free of ego.  Even when she plays complex ragtime tunes like Blind Blake, there is no flashiness.  This is the sort of music people make even when no one else is listening.  While it may be hard to imagine her singing being any worse, it doesn’t detract from the album at all because her vocals are so obviously heartfelt and genuine.  This album has a homespun quality to it, and is something worth revisiting often.