Dylan's ultimate achievement has been teaching us songs which rhyme "moon" with "June" need not be what songwriting is about. When he wrote and released the lyrics below, some thought he had forgotten.
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me pa
That must be what it's all about
That must be what it's all about
The seemingly banal last verse of Sign on the Window and a sometimes derided couplet from Dylan's New Morning. To a few, it came to represent his poetic demise and abandon of the revolution. It appeared a year after a stunned Greil Marcus had put his promo-copy of Self-Portrait on the turntable, heard the lead track All the Tired Horses and thinking he had received a copy with a Mitch Miller disc packed inside by mistake, shouted to himself "What IS This Shit" thus cementing his reputation as the premiere Dylanologist of all time. That he preserved his exclamation in print it to his credit. It has become the ultimate headline for a critical review. It won't ever be matched.
I am glad I am not a critic. I haven't read Greil's intro to the new box set yet, but I'll see if he wiggles out of an apology or not when I get around to it.
David Frost just passed away. Remember how hard he squeezed Nixon to say "I'm sorry" and the old red-baiter resisted in slow, dwindling agony? All that was missing was the sweat on his upper-lip which made the 1960 debates so memorable? Ahh…the seventies. C'mon Greil. Say it. We've already forgiven you a thousand times over.
Time heals all…and the recent release of Another Self Portrait 40 years later allows me to address the key track if one wishes to understand the material Mr. Dylan was producing in private and public during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
First of all, let's get the singing out of the way. Have you ever heard Clarence Ashley sing? Dock Boggs? For that matter, Charlie Patton or Blind Willie Johnson? No? Then shut up. If you want good singing, buy some pablum from Pattie Page or Pat Boone. The song has NEVER been about singing, unless you are looking for doggie "pop" in the window. Dylan's material, whether interpreting others or singing his own, has never required "good" singing. Alison Krauss sings like an angel. Dylan doesn't. Neither did (does?) Burt Bacharach. Who cares. He wrote I say a Little Prayer and I love that song. I don't care if Dionne, Burt or a hobo sings it. If a song makes you feel anything, it's good. After fifty years, one way to show complete blinding ignorance is to say "Dylan can't sing" while listening to auto-tune.
So Dylan was a little spoiled. After spending a few years two hours north of New York with the greatest rock band in history (excepting Levon, who bailed when Bob took over leadership of his band) he thought he was now ready for some studio musicians. Real professionals. It was his mistake. Bob, you already HAD the best, and they were growing better every day. Give them a few more years. They still didn't understand Harry Smith's curated caterwaulers like you. They were young. They could make kids in Toronto or down the Jersey Shore get drunk and screw (which is the only job a bar band has, after all…) but they hadn't quite mastered all the delicate nuances of the Nashville Cats. So Dylan went south.
A few years later Dylan relented and agreed. The Band was his band for ten years. From the 1965 earthquake to the 1974 titanic tour. Don't listen to the live album, which even the participants think was rote shouting…listen to Planet Waves which was the new Geffen product designed to get the guys on the road and line his pockets. Decades later it still sounds sublime.
(While I am at it, why didn't Columbia spring to include the three tracks Dylan did with the Band at the Woody Guthrie Tribute in 1968? It would have fit in that huge box somewhere. Maybe a mini-disc of some sort the size of a guitar pic and imprinted with a lenticular self-portrait of Mr. Dylan's eyes going back and forth looking for the gypsy.)
Dylan had no lapse in creative dripping. Sign on the Window is one of the most profound, honest, agonizing and real lyrics Dylan has ever written OR sung. He had been through a tornado of drugs and instant fame. It was settle down or die.
It isn't easy for any bright young man to stop the party. Dylan had to stop the party. It hurts to grow up. He did. These lyrics are not trite, not a cop-out, not a descent into rhyming simon, not abandoning the revolution. They are in perfect harmony with the sentiments of a young man trying to fit into an imperfect world. A world not ready for him and one which could never be. America eats its young. The sooner you learn the lesson, the easier it will be. It's why I tell jokes rather than cry. It is an evil place, this world. Numb it out or face the music.
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me pa
That must be what it's all about
That must be what it's all about
Greil Marcus recognized the truth of these lines so agonizingly learned by the rebel "song and dance man." As he wrote in 1970, in a well-deserved glowing review of New Morning "It's certain these last lines will be hailed as Bob Dylan's new message to us all, but they're hardly that. When a wife and a trout stream settle easily on the same plane, that's not a way of life but the ease of a dream. A cabin in Utah is the sort of dream one needs when it's gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, when fantasy is set against experience."
Bob Dylan can sing and Greil Marcus owes no one an apology.
Books and EBOOKS by Jim Linderman are available HERE
