MODERN TIMES: SEX AND VIOLENCE
One thing I do a lot of lately is talk about how Dylan's writing style
is like Shakespeare's - they both have this thing where the writing
goes beyond just the words and what they mean - there's this whole
other layer about the way the sounds of the words bounce off each
other, the way the rhymes relate to one another, the rhythm of the
words and the structures and so forth. Stuff that no one can do
consciously - if you tried, it'd come off as a mess. And when Dylan
sings his songs, he can bring that quality out in a way that no one
else can. We only have bits and pieces of info about what Shakespeare
was like as a performer, but I suspect he was like Dylan - erratic, not
to all tastes, but occasionally transcendent.
Anyway, on to how this new record is. I suspect that, if I'm going
along with this whole Shakespeare thing, that it'll be like, say,
"Henry IV." It doesn't usually get listed among the "greatest hits,"
like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, or the other more famous ones, but it
has its defenders. Modern Times won't usually get lumped in with Blood
on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde by future generation, but not
because is isn't a great work, and those who do dip their toes in will
be well rewarded for it. It's simply not Dylan's easiest album to
approach - it's often dark, disturbing, violent, and brooding. Other
than a western swing dance number or two, it's not really made for
grooving. It will probably sound better in winter than it does in
summer.
What we have here is not only Dylan's most violent album, but also
perhaps his most lusty. Everywhere, he's going off to war, recovering
from war, and thinking about women - sometimes in more wholesome ways
than others. In many of the best songs, he's doing both.
A lot of times, we're left wondering who (or what) the narrator is,
exactly, and what kind of world he comes from. I'm leaning towards the
idea that the songs take place in the same sort of dimension as Masked
and Anonymous - they're contemporary, more or less, but in a version of
our modern times where Robert E. Lee never gave the word that the civil
war was not to be a guerilla war, and it did, in fact, last to this
day, as Bob says it would have in Chronicles. Or maybe the civil war
going on is a whole new one, or maybe no one's sure if it's still the
same war or not.
We have songs of going to war, and post-war songs - in the second half
of the record, they even sort of follow a narrative structure. He goes
off to war in "Workingman's Blues #2", deals with losing the battle and
sets out of to travel in "Nettie Moore," and in "Ain't Talkin'" he's
still out traveling, a little less sane for wear. But we're missing a
song about the war itself - unless we count "Cross the Green Mountain."
Stick it in with another blues song (for pacing) after "Workingman's
Blues," or "Beyond the Horizon," and it would fit in, both musically
and in narrative terms, perfectly. In fact, it would very nearly tie
the whole album together, bringing in songs that normally seem outside
of the thing, or like filler - the lyrics to "Cross the Green Mountain"
have references to ancient light (see "When the Deal Goes Down"), music
coming from somewhere else (see "Thunder on the Mountain), the top of
the hill (see "Nettie Moore"), and altars burning (see "Ain't Talkin").
So some of the songs come from the point of view of a person fighting
in the war, and maybe some of the other songs are the songs this guy
hears in the night clubs and honkey tonks on the long journey between
battles or on the long journey home (I'm not saying this definitively,
of course, but it's turned out to be a pretty solid way to approach the
album as a whole). Now, all this isn't to "excuse" the blues and swing
songs, but one does have to wonder, at least initially, if they were
necessary. "Someday Baby," "Rollin and Tumblin," etc don't really break
any new ground, exactly, and, though they certainly do an excellent job
in keeping the pace of the album rolling smoothly, it's hard not to say
"do we really need any more Dylan blues songs?" Well, not necessarily.
But, on the other hand, it's hard to imagine that there could ever be
too many of them, and, anyway, they're very good blues songs - if
someone had dug them up on a long-lost Howlin' Wolf session, they might
be thought of as astonishing. I suppose we might as well ask if we
needed one more history play by Shakespeare, or one more mistaken
identity comedy - we don't, really, but one day we'll be glad to have
them around.
Anyway, on to the song by song:
THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN
I didn't get into this much at first - I skipped it the first few times
through the album as a whole. Then, listening to it with the rest of
the album as a point of reference, it seemed like a whole new world, a
rollicking start. My good friend Michael Smith thinks this was probably
written in the studio, and he may be right - the lines can seem a
little random, taken on their own, but here we have a song that goes
out of its way to establish the main themes of the album - impending
warfare and doom, lust, and the "outsider on the fringes" persona that
keeps coming back, getting ready to raise him an army and get him a
woman. We also get the one line - the Alicia Keyes reference - that
tells us that this is all contemporary, not a period piece, and, in the
last verse, we even get a foreshadowing of "Workingman's Blues #2" -
his pitchfork (his cruel weapon) is on the shelf, and he's planning to
go be a working man, planting and harvesting. A smiling start to a
not-so-smiley album.
SPIRIT ON THE WATER
This is the first one where I really wonder WHAT exactly the narrator
is supposed to be - something that's been to Paradise, that sees
spirits on the water. There's a hint that he might be a ghost - or
maybe the girl to whom he's singing is - assuming it's a girl, not some
spiritual entity. And if the girl is a spirit on the water, why is he
traveling by land, exactly? Certainly the riff and the mood of the song
calls to mind a good-natured ethereal being of some sort, drifting
along.
It's possible to say that this song sort of goes on to long - I imagine
that some of the verses will be dropped when the song is played live,
without many people missing them - but, on the other hand, the song
casts a sort of a lazy spell of its own that's hard to let go of. And
the ending - the GREAT last two verses and the harp solo - is worth the
wait.
A word on the last two verses: most of this song, for a good five
minutes, seems like an odd little love song, with occasional forays
into the "weird," (the ghost verse, etc). Then, at the end, we get a
pleasant "I wish I were with you in paradise" bit, followed, out of
left field, with the hilarious "I can't go back to paradise / I killed
a man back there," then a "you think I'm past my prime? let me see what
you got," one of a handful of challenges to fights on the album.
ROLLIN AND TUMBLIN
Just Another Blues Song, maybe, but a fun one. I love that he uses "I
woke up this morning" as the LAST line of the song. But, while mostly a
"woman done me wrong" song, there's still all of this apocalyptic stuff
to compliment it - early doom, long dead souls being conjured from the
tomb (see also: "frankie's in the graveyard, albert's raising hell" in
"Nettie Moore"), and the returning rising sun that will make some
people burn (which, of course, brings us back to the Sun/Son stuff we
debated over in Not Dark Yet).
WHEN THE DEAL GOES DOWN
Maybe the most puzzling song of them all - midway between a Rudy Vallee
crooning vehicle and church hymn, it might seem like a fairly sappy (if
rather verbose) love song, except for that weird chorus line, which
begs one question in particular: what deal? The one Robert Johnson
spoke of comes to mind, of course. Presumably it's something to do with
the end of the world, at least as we know it, but then again, who
knows?
"Make You Feel My Love," like the similar "You Belong To Me," was a
straight up love song which the sick among us might have perceived as
having a certain darkness underneath the surface. The chorus of this
one points a little more plainly at the darkness, and, at the end we
have deafening noise by the stream (a la "Cross the Green Mountain").
Few writers could do a love song this foreboding without there being
something of a theatrical grin behind the whole thing. Guys like Nick
Cave write "evil" long songs a lot, but you can tell that they're
smiling about it. Dylan plays it straight here.
D-minus for grammer on the more "more frailer than flowers" line,
though.
Anyone else hear a saxophone somewhere buried in the mix? I can
certainly imagine there being one here.
SOMEDAY BABY
Just Another Blues Song, but more sinister. Lots of great lines in
here, and looks as though it may be released as a single, since there's
apparently a radio edit out there. While it's not the most striking
song here, I do think it would make a good single - it's a solid, very
well-written blues song, catchy enough for the airwaves, and it if
seems easy to bash, that's mainly because it doesn't break new ground,
doesn't seem to have any loftier aspirations that just to be a blues
song, and only has much to do with the rest of the album due to all of
the violence in the song - threats to wring necks and drive people from
their homes, even though he loves the person he's singing to (to his
chagrin).
So who's he singing to - a woman? Cigarettes or some other bad habit?
Money, even? There are some lines that match up to the theory that he's
singing to some sort of addiction, not just a person. in fact, the more
I listen to it, the less it sounds like he's singing to a woman - or,
if he he is, he's using the woman to represent something else, or just
personifying the addiction somehow.
Another phantom instrument - I keep thinking I hear a violin wailing
away in the back, but I'm not sure.
WORKINGMAN'S BLUES #2
Kicking off what I guess would be side 2 - a rather darker side than
the already dark side 1, and starting off what seems like more a
continual narrative, here's a song in a very unusual (for Dylan) ABAB
rhyming scheme, in which our hero sets off to fight - something he's
spoken about doing a couple of times in earlier songs. We've already
established that something bad is going down, that he's raising an
army, and that he's been driven from his home.
This is a major composition, and one that Dylan clearly put some
thought into (you just don't write this long of a piece in ABAB without
putting some thought into it). A line I keep coming back to is "my
cruel weapons have been put on the shelf / come and sit down on my
knee," since it suggests so much backstory about the guy and the girl
to whom he's singing. She's had reason, in the past, to be afraid of
him (hardly surprising, given all of the threats of violence in earlier
songs on the album), but no more. It's time to focus on the big things
now.
I'm sticking to my earlier theory that the "new path that we trod" is a
reference to "I Ain't Got No Home," in which the narrator (who,
notably, calls himself a "working man") mentions that his is a "path
that a million feet have trod." Dylan's working man might remember a
time when the working man was treading a new, better path, one that's
just a sweet memory now that the buying power of the proletariate has
gone down.
A brief word on the proletarian angle - plenty of people will point out
that, whatever else he may be, he himself certainly isn't part of the
proletariat. But A: that doesn't mean the narrator isn't, and B:
certainly doesn't mean that Dylan isn't a working man. He's said many
times that he looks at what he does as a trade, and, while his is a
very well paid job that many of us would prefer to our own, what Dylan
does is a job, and not an easy one, at that.
BEYOND THE HORIZON
"Beyond the Horizon it's easy to love" - which, naturally, means that
here before the horizon, it's hard. Going back to that Rudy Vallee
feeling that we got a little earlier, maybe this is the radio hit of
the day in that alternate reality where the old war is still going on -
it has a lot in common with "Some Sunny Day," a hit from a previous
war. It's a love song, but once again, it's love in the midst of
something sinister, of fire and flames. It's dark, it's dreary, and
he's wounded and weary. Someone's life has been spared for some
unknown reason. If we're taking this as a song about the war the guy
sets off for in WB#2, (and I'm not saying it is, necessarily), the
general feeling here is that things didn't go well, and there's a hint
("Someone prayed for your soul") that the "you" in the song has died.
It's a pretty song, but all the pretty things in it only exist beyond
the horizon - not where the singer is at the moment.
If we're taking my idea that there's a narrative structure here for
granted, right about here is where we're missing the song about the
fighting itself. And, as I mentioned, I think "Cross the Green
Mountain" would fit perfectly here - it covers the narrative (more
explicitly than the hints in "Beyond the Horizon,"and fits in well
musically, too. If I were slipping it in on "Modern Times Mix," as
we've all surely done with Infidels, I'd put it there with Tell Ol'
Bill for pacing purposes, though I'll be waiting for Huck's Tune with
great interest.)
NETTIE MOORE
So, if my hunch is right, this may be the sequel to "Workingman's Blues
#2" - is Nettie the person he was singing to before? And is she dead
now, perhaps? There are hints that she died in Beyond the Horizon, and
he predicted that she'd be laid low a couple of songs back. Or is she
just out there somewhere, waiting beyond the horizon?
Here, our hero has finished the fighting, at least for now, and, from
the sound of it, came out a little worse for wear, a long, long way
from home. You don't get the sense that his side won the fight - the
blues are coming down like hail, the world has gone black, and
something's out of whack. And, though he's in love with Nettie Moore
(the "you" in the song, presumably), and will come back to her when
he's done traveling, there's another woman in the song, his baby who
cooks all day, bringing in the menage a trois element that's come up in
so many Dylan songs over the years. Or maybe the woman who cooks all
night is the same "woman as symbol" from back in "Someday Baby."
THE LEVEE'S GONNA BREAK
lyrically, kinda continues the "not ready to go back" theme. In terms
of pacing, it may be the most important song - following Nettie with
Ain't Talkin would be a whole lot of bleak - in the middle here, we
have an uptempo song that hints more at redemption - throwing away ones
clothes, jumping in the river, and being as good as new. Salvation
could be behind the corner. One big question: is he saying "you say you
want me to quit you," or is it " you say 'you want me to quit you?' "
And, in the midst of this, MORE apocalyptic images of flood and
fleeing. Thinking of Katrina is hard not to do The levee's gonna break,
and some people are still sleeping, suggesting that, though the war
between the proletariate and the bourgeouise is still going on (or
already over), some people are still not seeing it. Probably the least
compelling song to me (at least right now), but its use in terms of
pacing is obvious.
One review pointed out that if the album ended here, it would have a
rounded, redemptive feel. But our hero isn't done walking yet.
AIN'T TALKIN
And now we pick up our wounded hero again - still traveling the world,
as he planned to do in Nettie Moore. The fight's not over yet, and he
can't get away. He's quite possibly going a bit crazy here, hence the
line about the toothache in his heal, which identifies him with Old Dan
Tucker (who was more of a "funny" crazy), and still thinking about the
girl he left behind. Maybe it's Nettie, maybe it's the other girl, but,
whichever, he doesn't seem to think he'll be making it back to her
anymore. He's already gotten as far as the world's end, and there are
still enemies to slaughter, still deaths to avenge. Still people out
there who will crush you with wealth and power. A lot of work left to
do.
My hunch is that considering this as the third album in a trilogy (with
"Time Out of Mind" and "Love and Theft") is more the record company
talking than Dylan, but it works - it makes perfect sense for a trilogy
that opens with "I'm walkin' through streets that are dead," to be
book-ended with "ain't talkin, just walkin" (another thing pointed out
by Michael Smith). Walking is a theme that turns up over and over again
in all three albums.
So I started to write this as a review, but ended up with something
more like an early study guide - one that's nowhere near complete. All
of this, of course, leaves out a lot. What about all the references to
blindness? All of the things about between the contrast between night
and day (including the stunning "The sun is strong, I'm standing in the
light / I wish to G-d that it were night" ), which is also all over the
last two records.
So that's my theory - or, any way, my approach to the album as a whole
piece of work so far. There's a bit of a narrative structure, one which
may be at least partially intentional. I'm not saying Bob was sitting
around in the studio saying "hey, play a little march thing between
verses on Horizon, so people remember that this is a song dealing with
an army," but looking at them from that angle - the Masked and
Anonymous Civil War reality angle - is one way to look at it. The next
guy to post something like this may see something totally different,
and I could end up writing an equally long review that doesn't mention
any of this stuff. That's one of the great things about Dylan albums -
like Shakespeare, they just keep working.
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