Bob Dylan's "Love and Theft" Revisted: 2011, and 2001
Sky full of fire, pain pourin' down - Bob Dylan and 9/11
September 10, 2011
2:07 PM MST
I was so looking forward to September 11, 2001.
At the time, I was a buyer for a record store chain, eagerly anticipating the release of Bob Dylan's new album, "Love and Theft," scheduled for that day. I expected to spend hours tracking sales, anticipating big numbers. After work, I planned to drive two hours to see Lucinda Williams at the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, and maybe pick up the "Limited Edition" version of "Love and Theft" on the way.
I was dismayed when the Rolling Stones' album Bridges To Babylon, released the same day as TOOM, initially charted higher. However, Dylan's album had more staying power and ended up charting longer, eventually winning multiple Grammys. A Sony rep told me that when the album was about to go "Gold," they received a call from Dylan's office, wondering what could be done to reach that goal. It had been years, I was told, since Dylan's office called about album sales.
During the weekend before release date, I wrote a review of "Love and Theft" for whoever would be interested. It was originally posted on September 9, 2001, at Expecting Rain, with an updated version posted at rec.music.dylan a few days later.
The album was rich with imagery and humor. It was fun to connect the dots to literary, theatrical, cinematic, and musical works. Other Bobcats did the same, and we shared our findings.
I heard there was going to be a new TV commercial for "Love and Theft" that was to debut on street date, so I started a videotape recording at the six-hour speed, and went to work.
September 11 started out like any other busy New Release Day. My boss had left Boston's Logan Airport at 7:45 for a music retail conference in Florida. As usual, I spent the morning in my cubicle, doing warehouse pulls while listening to Howard Stern on the radio, when the reports started coming in. Stern was in New York, heroically reporting as best he could, trying to make sense of it all. I remember one caller in particular describing the chaos near "Ground Zero" (as it would soon be known), when she witnessed the second plane crash into the World Trade Center, declaring it a deliberate hit.
At the office, we immediately confirmed that my boss was not on any of the hijacked planes.
The images of the falling towers, the uncertainty of more attacks, and the possibility of war, all consumed me. I thought of the future, and how it would affect my children, in grade school at the time. I also thought of friends in New York and D.C.
Everything felt gray. I decided to keep working, trying to maintain some stability in my life. Co- workers convened in the conference room to watch reports on TV. I'd peek in occasionally to get an update. I called a friend in California, waking him up. I told him to turn on the TV. "What channel?" "Any channel."
Of course there were conversations. I remember one in particular, where I connected the attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., to the Book of Revelation. I had remembered Dylan quoting passages that, in the "final end," the political (Washington, D.C.) and financial (New York) centers would go first. My co-workers thought my observation odd, until I clarified my statement, saying I did not think it was a fulfilled prophecy, but someone using the book as an instruction manual. Strange that a quote I used from the New Testament came from a Bob Dylan bootleg.
The stores were closed. We all went home early. The Lucinda Williams concert was canceled.
I listened to "Love and Theft" on the way home. It sounded like he had written the songs that morning:
Every step of the way we walk the line /Your days are numbered, so are mine/Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape/We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape/City’s just a jungle; more games to play/Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away - from "Mississippi."
I arrived home and rewound the videotape, not to see the Dylan commercial, obviously, but to watch the tragedy unfold. One of the hosts of The Today Show was wearing an apron, doing a fluff piece, when they cut to breaking news.
World gone wrong, indeed.
A couple of months later, Dylan spoke to Rolling Stone magazine (November 22, 2001, issue 882) about "Love and Theft," and his reaction to the events of 9/11:
One of those Rudyard Kipling poems, "Gentlemen-Rankers," comes to my mind: "We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth/ We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung/ And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth/ God help us, for we knew the worst too young!" If anything, my mind would go to young people at a time like this. That's really the only way to put it.
... I mean, art imposes order on life, but how much more art will there be? We don't really know. There's a secret sanctity of nature. How much more of that will there be? At the moment, the rational mind's way of thinking wouldn't really explain what's happened. You need something else, with a capital E, to explain it. It's going to have to be dealt with sooner or later, of course...
Things will have to change. And one of those things that will have to change: People will have to change their internal world.
(Posted ten years earlier, on September 9. 2001:)
BOB DYLAN"Love And Theft"
Columbia Records
I don't believe in astrology, but I think one thing is for sure - Bob Dylan is a gemini. Revolutionary/traditionalist, acoustic/electric, Jewish/Christian, Artist/Sellout. Dylan, and his art, brings drama to the contradictions in us - and around us - that often co-exist in various degrees of (dis)comfort. "Love And Theft" continues this tradition - the title already hints at this - sharing/stealing, "steal a kiss", "stole my heart." It can be two different forms of possession. "Love And Theft" also expresses other mixtures - country swing and the blues, 1940's-style crooning songs delivered in Dylan's gloriously rough voice, light arrangements with lyrics of unblinking honesty.
"Love And Theft" doesn't sound particularly like any other Dylan album. In some ways the structure resembles 1967's John Wesley Harding - 12 songs that sound like they came from another long-gone era, so full of ideas that there are hardly any solos. JWH, however, was an acoustic album, "L&T" is electic - performed with Dylan's excellent touring band, augmented by Augie Meyers on keyboards and Clay Meyers on congas. It is Dylan's most focused collection of original material since 1979's Slow Train Coming. As great as Dylan's last studio album Time Out Of Mind (1997) was, one gets
the feeling that there was more material recorded, but decisions were made based on the physical limitations of one compact disc. On "Love And Theft," Dylan sounds confident, upbeat, even playful at times, mixing insights into the human conditions with silly little jokes ("Freddie who? He say Freddie or not here I come," "Room service ... send up a room").
As poet and commentator on the world in which we inhabit, Dylan has chosen, with his first album of the millennium, to focus on another century, roughly from the Civil War to the Sun Sessions, bookending two important eras in race relations. (A recent book called Love And Theft dealt the minstrel shows). When Dylan was hospitalized in 1997 - just before the release of Time Out Of Mind - Dylan said he thought he was "going to meet Elvis." In "Love And Theft," Elvis is everywhere - "Mississippi," "Teddy Bear" in "Honest With Me," "Toast to the king" in "Summer Days," and especially in the opening rockabilly song, "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum." Not only is "Tweedle Dee" the name of a song Presley sang live in the mid 1950's, but it contains this line referring to Elvis's early raw recordings, and the lure of lucre from RCA records - "They're makin' a noise to the Sun -His Master's Voice is calling me." This whole song sounds like it could be about Elvis' controversial manager Col. Tom Parker, and all of those who have made money off of the King's corpse. (Dylan actually gave props to Peter Guralnick's recent Elvis biography, Last Train To Memphis). Elvis was, of course, a walking - or should I say hip-shaking- contradiction. A mix of black and white music, artist and tool, handsome and bloated, dead and alive.
The mention of family is also a recurring theme on the album. Not only have we learned of the success of the Wallflowers, and a secret second marriage (preceded by a daughter), but also the recent death of his mother (a mother's death in mentioned more than once on the album). This might explain Dylan's exploration of 1940's style ballads (think Leon Redbone - an early favorite of Dylan's.) There are also multiple references to babies, weddings, and funerals.
But this is not to say this album sounds like a museum piece - far from it. Dylan sounds alive, the arrangements are possibly the most complex in his career. Eric Clapton and Brian Setzer- two artists who Dylan shared the stage with in 1999 - recently has great success with albums of "traditional" music - blues (EC's From The Cradle) and swing music (Setzer's cover of "Jump Jive And Wail".)
Dylan's new CD, however, is all original material, all sounding fresh and alive - it was recorded in a very productive two-week period. For every old-fashioned romantic moment like "Moonlight," there is a modern reference. (Bob actually uses the phrase "booty call" in "Cry A While.")
As for the actual songs, "Highwater (For Charlie Patton)" is probably the most stunning. Named for a relatively obscure artist (one of his riffs was the musical basis for Dylan's 1997 epic "Highlands"), "Highwater" is a haunting tale of ruin - given an extra feeling of authenticity by Larry Campbell's banjo - reminiscent of the great writing of "Down In The Flood" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," complete with quotes from old blues and folk songs, as well as gallows humor:
Many of the songs are reminiscent of Dylan's best albums - most notably Highway 61, Blonde On Blonde, The Basement Tapes, and Blood On The Tracks, as well as the nursery rhymes of Under The Red Sky - without ever feeling like he is reliving past glories. The closing "Sugar Baby" is a distant cousin to "Idiot Wind," "Lonesome Day Blues" explores electric blues a la "Pledging My Time." In the hands of fools, the blues can be tedious - in the hands of a master, it is sublime.
Another theme, which in some ways is an extension of the contradiction theme, is the way things not turning out the way it was planned. In "Floater (Too Much to Ask)", Dylan sings:
One of the boss' hangers-on . . .
Tryin' to bully you, strong arm you,
Inspire you with fear
and this from "Sugar Baby":
Try to make things better for someone sometimes
You just end up makin' it a thousand time worse.
Getting back to the contradictions, let the lyrics speak for themselves:
- I got love for you and it's all in vain (also the name of two classic blues songs)
- Sky full of fire, pain pourin' down
- Some people they ain't human/ they ain't got no heart or soul
- I'm a-cryin' to the Lord to be meek and mild
- What do you mean you can't repeat the past?/ Of course you can!
- My future's already a thing of the past
Lookin' at the window at the pecan (peeking) pie
I'm stark naked ... I'm hunting bear (bare)
Plus lyrics that just hit you in the face:
- The siamese twins are coming to town.
- I'm stranded in the city that never sleeps/ some of these women just give me the creeps
- My back's been to the wall so long it feels like it's stuck/ Why don't you break my heart one more time just for good luck
And look at the people in these songs: Romeo and Juliet, Desdemona and Othello, plus police, preachers, the Devil, and, of course, God. By revisiting the past, Dylan shows us where we've been, where we are, and where we are going. Looking like a roving riverboat gambler, Dylan wants to step out of the present day, to reflect on what is going on. Poker-faced, you can't guess what's he is thinking until he shows his hand. ("You can't win with a losing hand" he also sang on "Things Have Changed.") This way Dylan can get some perspective - something that in our media-saturated world, we have little time to do ourselves:
I'm watchin' the boats, I'm studyin' the dust
and
One day you'll open your eyes and you'll see where you are
As usual, Bob Dylan and his band - multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell, guitarist Charlie Sexton, drummer David Kemper, and bassist Tony Garnier, will be back on the road shortly, hopefully playing many of the songs on "Love & Theft." Dylan may actually be referring to his devoted fans, many of whom secretly record shows with hidden recording devices (some of these recordings have made it onto Dylan's official website, as well on CD singles) near the end of the album:
Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff/plenty of places to hide things if you want to hide them bad enough
Life is complicated, love can be a mess, both are fragile.Yet we must all live with each other in a world that seems to be spinning faster every day.
Plus it's got a good beat, and you can dance to (most of) it.
I'll give it a ten!
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