Still Dylan After All These Years

Strange shadows in the stranger night ...

There he is, the inimitable face peering out of yet another magazine cover, announcing an article about his latest album. Only this time it's the publication of the AARP, and the album consists entirely of classics from the American songbook that were all recorded once by Frank Sinatra.

Say what? Yes, it's true. We have entered a time warp where the most shocking thing the perennial iconoclast Bob Dylan can do is to slap us upside the head by crooning songs our parents or grandparents (or even great-grandparents) listened to. Then again, why should we be surprised? He's been doing this for about fifty years, continually evolving and moving on just when we thought we had him pegged.

After reading the article I went straight to Amazon to download the album, Shadows In The Night – $1.00 off with a coupon code for AARP members. Yes, he's giving out senior citizen discounts. And he actually says in the interview that if it were up to him he would give the album away to all their readers. Shades of the old Bob, impossible to say how sincere or sarcastic this was.

At first hearing it may be a shock. He's put together yet another unorthodox band with a unique sound. This one features pedal steel guitar, acoustic bass – often bowed – and a soft horn section. “No drums, no piano,” he brags. And the tempos are so slow that even as a fan I'm tempted to ask them to pick it up a bit. That would probably be a mistake, though. As so many before have done, the album grows on you with repeated listening until you understand the wisdom of it and how it is likely just right.

Dylan's voice is less raspy than on the previous album, Tempest, which was sold in Starbucks throughout the land. But his world-weary vocal cords lend a heartfelt air to the collection of songs about love, loss, and yearning with an ache of spiritual overtones. You can hear inklings of his classic whine in lines like “lift me … to Par-a-diiiiiise.” It starts with the title lyrics to the opening song, “I'm a Fool To Want You,” and ends with a plea to the Almighty in "That Lucky Old Sun:"

Show me that river, take me across
Wash all my troubles away.
Like that lucky old sun, give me nothing to do
But roll 'round heaven all day.

He didn't write this, or any of the others, but he says he knows them deeply because they speak to him, and he certainly imparts his own stamp to them. In all, it's a sound you can spend some time with, perhaps fortified by a bourbon or two to slow you down. Have a sip, settle back, and take it in.

The Long History

I couldn't possibly indulge this way if I weren't willing to get nostalgic. How could I not, after listening to this man since my early teens? I still remember my first encounter with him on the floor of the classroom where my age group met weekly at the Unitarian church. One of us, David P___, who hung out at The Flick, our local coffee house, had brought a little battery powered turntable so he could play the Freewheelin' album for us. The eight or ten of us clustered around it, straining to pick out the words from the tiny speaker.

Words. That's what it was about. At a time when pop music was nothing but shoo-be-do-wop and things even more inane (ie, “The One-Eyed One-Horned Flying Purple People Eater”), before even the Beatles had come along to up the ante a bit, here was this troubadour from the middle ages who'd traded his lute for a guitar and started emitting a torrent of poetry set to song that seemed to be exactly what we knew we wanted to hear, and to say what we knew we wanted to say. What an unexpected wonder.

As Joan Baez would later put it in "Diamonds and Rust:"

You burst on the scene already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You stole into my heart

In a few years my music buddy and I had collected every subsequent album, along with the work of Joan Baez, while simultaneously discovering the literature of the Beats. We went to see Joan when she came to Miami, and got to shake her hand afterwards back stage. Alas, I missed Bob when he did the same, but none of his songs escaped us.

By the senior year of high school I had my own record player on the floor of my own bedroom entertaining some friends with illicit wine and Bringing It All Back Home. The words – he had gone electric, but it was still about the words.

In rapid succession came Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde. Then there was The Motorcycle Accident, and The Change. At the peak of his visionary productivity came this sudden hiatus, followed by the folksy and almost comical John Wesley Harding, and then the country-style Nashville Skyline. What in the world was going on? Nothing new, really. As he had been doing all along, he continued going where he wanted and doing what he wanted to do. There were people he left behind from the moment he struck up "Maggie's Farm" at the Newport Folk Festival with electric guitar in hand and the blues-band army of Paul Butterfield backing him up. Others no doubt fell by the wayside when he wandered into born-again gospel. But for many of us he remained one of the background tracks of our lives, even if he receded further into the background.

In my case my close friend Richard was one of the most stalwart faithful, the one who kept insisting that I listen to each new album, and who continued to find revelations in each one. I confess I stopped collecting them all, but several of them made me sit up and listen again. Like the opening of “Hurricane” on the Desire album: “Pistol shots ring out in the bar-room night” – a line worthy of Jack Kerouac, using one of his favorite poetic devices to co-opt an unlikely noun as an adjective – which goes on to warn you, “Here comes the story of the Hurricane.” On top of that it was a return to a classic protest song, one which was instrumental in the retrial and eventual release of the unjustly convicted boxer. Great stuff.

There are too many other twists and turns in this long career to mention them all in anything shorter than a book. And if you're so inclined there are plenty of books to consume. Amazon even has a page called The 20 Best Bob Dylan Books. But the one I recommend is Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. This work focuses on the evolution of his work more than his life and places him in context, beginning with the origins of folk music and blues and the hymns of the Sacred Harp, working through union and folk songs, tin pan alley, and so on up to date. What comes clear is that not only did Dylan grow out of this rich American loam, but he was completely aware of it and avidly absorbing as much of it as he could at every stage.

Which brings us right back to the kind words he has for Frank Sinatra, and the deep feeling he brings to the songs of a bygone era in the middle of the last century. Once you understand the context it all makes perfect sense. After all this time, he's still Dylan.

Don't take my word for it ... listen to the NPR review.

We Shall Overcome

"When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean."

- Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.

So Pete Seeger is 90. This achievement was celebrated in a big star-studded bash at Madison Square Garden recently, honoring a lifetime of service to the causes of public good. Seems as if he's been an old man for my whole life. The year I turned 15 and discovered folk music Pete was already 43, older than my parents, and that seemed plenty old at the time. Now I'm a grandpa myself and he's still old enough to be looked up to.

My first years in college coincided with Pete's short-lived TV show called "Rainbow Quest." Of his many guests I especially remember the delightful Malvina Reynolds who gave us "Little Boxes" (made of ticky-tacky), and guitar wizard Leo Kottke, who demonstrated how beat up his instrument was by knocking his cigarette ashes into the hole in its scarred top.

By that time Pete was already a veteran of the Depression era, the struggles for unionization, racial equality and nuclear disarmament, and the blacklisting of the McCarthy period. Always a survivor, he somehow managed to emerge from it all unscathed and undaunted -- in the words of Bruce Springsteen, he "outlasted the bastards."

One thing that struck me in Seeger's recent interviews was that he didn't care for the fuss being made over him because, "I don't like big things." How to reconcile that with a lifetime of involvement with big social issues? I found an answer in the footage of him wandering through the crowd at an outdoor concert, his face lighting up with delighted attention to anyone who wanted to speak with him. This has been his magic, to take the personal relationship to the scale of a mass movement, recognizing that all meaningful human contact is always one-to-one. His songs speak to us individually, but appeal to what is universal in us, challenging us to do the same in our relations with one another.

The highest measure of success for song writers is not how many albums they sell but how many other people perform their songs. By now Pete's list of indelible tunes has imprinted itself on our collective consciousness to a degree that insures they will be with us for a long while. And each time the words are taken up by a new voice, the sentiments they embody spring into action once more, reaching new ears and new minds, addressing the age old problems in yet another incarnation.

Take "If I Had a Hammer," for example, which Seeger wrote along with Lee Hays of The Weavers. In the early Sixties, while Seeger himself was still banned from television, the tune was taken to a mass audience by Peter, Paul and Mary, who delivered it into millions of living rooms "live" on the Smothers Brothers show -- and nailed it, I might add. Thus the lyrics spoke on behalf of the one who was not allowed to speak. A message of empowerment spread across the land, encouraging anyone who would listen to pick up that hammer, ring that bell, and take up the chorus of social change.

And who else would have thought that you could clean up a river by building a boat and writing a song? Only Pete could have brought to bear the implacable confidence that if we would only stop filling it with refuse the waters of the Hudson would soon run clear once more. And what a parable that is for the many perils and evils that we still have to overcome.

Did I say "overcome?" Of course that brings us to the most famous song that Pete did not write, the gospel tune which he published back in 1949 and helped to foster into what became the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. This song has a long history with many participants, but Pete's biggest contribution, aside from the verses he added, was his revision of a single word from will to shall. He claims this was simply because "it sang better," and that feels like it is so. But I would argue that it served another function as well.

Grammatically, when using the first person we are supposed to use shall normally, and will to indicate a higher degree of intention or determination. The fact that this is opposite to the usage for the second or third person has helped to make it so confusing that shall is falling out of use altogether, especially in the common language of the folk who are theoretically responsible for folk songs. The result, I think, is that in common speech shall, whenever it is used, indicates emphasis, grammatically correct or not. In America, especially, we have the words of Abraham Lincoln lurking in the backs of our minds, promising that this government of the people "shall not perish from the earth," and that is a use of the intentional that has left its impression on us.

[A similar phenomenon happened among Quakers, whose use of "thee" and "thou" dates back to when these commonly used terms were simply the familiar forms of "you." They made a point of using them because they did not want to confer undue respect toward any individual by the use of the formal "you." Well, the language has changed since then. Thee and thou have disappeared from English altogether, with the notable exception of addressing God in scriptures or formal prayers. Thus the formerly familiar terms have come to indicate a respect, not to say awe, for the Deity. Any Quakers who persist in the old usage are considered quaint. And though they could argue that they are only showing proper respect for "that of God in everyone," that was not the original intention. In reality, most contemporary Quakers have adopted the current usage of "you" along with everyone else, because plain speech was the goal of this exercise.]

So my argument is that in current usage Seeger's substitution of the word shall gave an added emphasis of intention, just as it would if addressing a crowd in the third person. In any case the singing of the tune certainly enhanced the intentions of a generation of activists for peace and social justice, and even took root in soil as far afield as Czechoslovakia in the peaceful revolution of 1989.

Since Pete came of age with the arrival of Marshall McCluhan's "global village," it is not unusual that this wandering troubadour has reached far more people than he would have been able to do in the past, no matter how much travelling he might have done. Many who have been touched by his spirit have only done so through a recording or an image on TV. I've only seen him once in person at a concert he gave with Arlo Guthrie in Miami Beach some years ago. But that one close encounter was enough to last a lifetime.

And you know, Miami audiences are not known for their willingness to sing along. But we sang that night, because Pete asked us to, and because he made us feel like singing.