1.

Theory one: Bob Dylan wants to be Eric Clapton.  When you go to an Eric Clapton show, you
hope and expect that the songs are going to be mere launching pads for fiery solos and blistering
improvisation.  Might be brilliant, might be hackneyed and dull, might just not be to your taste.
But if you go, it's what you expect.  True, Clapton’s not quite a jamband, in that he has famous
songs and rock star mystique and all of that.  There's a classic-rock warhorse vibe when he
cranks up Layla or even Cocaine.  But Clapton's also not a greatest-hits act, where you pretty much
are there to hear your favorites with the live-show magic that allows them to transcend their
cliche.

Surely Dylan seems like he should be that kind of act. You go to hear Rainy Day Women,
not see where Bob’s gonna take the solo on third go-round of a nameless blues-rock song.  Right?

Not tonight.  This time -- it was one of the "good" Dylan shows, thanksfully -- Dylan was all
about the jam.  He was taking solos (off Honest With Me, or Lonesome Day Blues, or Summer Days,
all rockers off the new Love & Theft) into stratospheres worthy of Slowhand or any of his
more recent disciples.  Dylan's band has begun to coalesce, not just as an exceptionally tight Dylan and
standards group, but as an improvisatory unit as well.  The three guitarists (Dylan included)
traded riffs, solos, short phrases; they picked up where others left off; facing each other, they
seemed to be on the same page as only some musicians – but all great musicians – are able.

So what are we to make of Dylan’s four-minute long exploration of Watchtower (the Jimi
Hendrix, 4/4 version no less)?  With the intentionally old fashioned (but classic, in the way
the word used to be used before Led Zeppelin existed) lyrics and sonic structures on the album,
with the pretty fuckin' cool soloing -- is Dylan trying to be Jerry Garcia?

It was a surprise, to me, to realize how many solos Dylan was actually performing – I seem to recall
his playing mostly rhythm the time I saw him three years ago.  This shouldn't be so shocking.
Dylan proved on the acoustic albums which began his latter-day comeback, Good as I Been to You
and World Gone Wrong, that he’s an outstanding technical musician.  But somehow it surprises me
every time I really see it.  I sort of expect him to be barely there, stoned, grizzled, war-weary -- not
launching off into intense blizzards of 1-4-5 rock & roll improvisation.

Maybe we just focus too much on the Voice.  Dylan’s voice is so distinctive, so
desperately far from standard measures of beauty – we tend to fixate on it.  The guitar gets
overshadowed.  And of course, the voice is saying those words.  Dylan sang Blowin’ in the Wind
tonight like it was forty years ago.  At first, I turned to my friend and wondered what relevance
the song could possibly have anymore – it seemed like lame nostalgia.  But then I remembered
that the song has been on every September 11 compilation, and, despite the likely misunderstanding
of the song's anti-war lyrics (I feel like it's the new Born in the USA, in a way), it has brought solace to
millions of Americans.  Dylan was actually singing his most recent hit.  And of course the words,
through it all and despite all the quotings and misappropriations, are beautiful.

But it would be a mistake to let the voice and the words drift away from the music, because
Bob Dylan has long realized what great popular music is often all about – words of pain to beautiful
music.  That's what it is.  Take Dylan's first encore, Things Have Changed, which despite having won
an Oscar seemed to be unknown to the MSG crowd.  Dylan sang words like

    Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
    Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

with the desperation that makes them resonate through the interwoven guitar riffs and cool
shuffle beat.  The song spoke through the music, and the music found articulation in the words.
It seems to me that a similar juxtaposition of sorrow and transcendence runs through all the best
slow Beatles songs, animates the power of garage, and powered every good band of the grunge/rock
revival of the 90s.  The words may be about sorrow and desperation, but damn if you don’t want
to get up and dance.

So maybe, in his old age, Dylan has started to let the music speak more and more.  There
were a couple of songs where the vocal delivery echoed some of the lean years (ooh, around 1979
to 1993 or so): the all-too-usual thrown away lines on Tangled up in Blue, the curt Just Like a
Woman.  I really wonder whether he mangles the vocal delivery on these songs on purpose, or
whether he doesn’t think he can hit the notes.  Tonight was rare in that Dylan really did sing out
on the long open notes of Forever Young, Blowin’ in the Wind, and others.  It was a treat.  But
there was a lot of chopped, up-note-ending lines that seemed to say ‘I don’t much care about this
song anymore.’

Not so the music.  Aside from a meager two-note harmonica solo on an otherwise
beautiful Don’t Think Twice (It’s Alright), Dylan rocked the harp, the electric and the acoustic
guitar.  And, to repeat, the solos were long.  I felt I understood what the folks that put Dylan and
the Dead together thought they were doing.  (And why they were so disappointed in the result.)
Dylan seems like he's in a different world from the Neil Youngs, Claptons, Allmans, et al – but
why do we think that?  He played out on almost every song, and in his recent fashion he seemed to be
physically shaken around by the arrangements of the notes, gyrating and responding to each
surprising turn of phrase.

This reading of Dylan helps inform Love and Theft, as well as his live performances since
the beginning of the good new days.  L&T has been called the Immortality album, in marked
progression from Time out of Mind, the “Death” album.  This isn’t a bad tagline – Love and Theft
does seem to be searching for immortality in music, in revisiting these old styles of songs.
“Summer days/summer nights are gone/But I know a place/Where there’s still something going
on.”  Dylan is in the autumn years, if not the winter.  He knows it.  But even though summer is
over, there’s a light on somewhere, in the old juke joint where the band of journeymen know
their tunes and earned their chops.  They’ll give you a good time, and you’ll dance, and watch
this geetar-man play his solos like Bird soaring, man he’ll play in a way that every note is
dancing on his own grave.

In fact, Love and Theft is filled with songs that are just screaming to be played live.  We
heard a lot of the new album tonight – seven songs, in fact, from Tweedledee to Sugar Baby.
Like the Dead and the zillions of contemporary jambands, Dylan seemed to be using the tunes as
springboards for jamming.  That explains Honest with Me, which on the album is a lame
caricature of “arena-rock.”  Tonight in the arena, it rocked the house.  Summer Days felt
altogether more confident live; the song jumped.  Older material – Like a Rolling Stone, for
example -- was good, and definitely pleased the nostalgia crowd, but in general it just wasn't
as lively.  You feel like he wrote these new songs just to have more fun jamming to them at shows.

 Of course, these two strands are really the same strand.  The album is about immortality
in the music, and the music begs you to bring it to life on stage.  Dylan’s charlatan-journeyman
look (‘I sure can play, and I can entertain you, but I’m still a con-man too.’) isn’t an abandonment
of Dylan’s search for truth.  He just found out that the truth is up there on stage, under the lights,
in those moments that make all the rest worthwhile.
 

2.
 

 Everyone knows that Dylan went a little crazy in the late seventies.  He became a born-
again Christian, then went back, then who knows, now he’s on Chabad telethons – the idea that
we could ever understand Dylan, like fans hoped to in the Sixties, surely isn’t around anymore.
The young kids might not know about this five year glitch in Dylan’s biography; maybe for them
it’s straight from Highway 61 to now.  (Bless them, they don’t even know about the lame years,
or albums like Knocked out Loaded.)  But for most of us, Dylan’s like a milder form of Michael
Jackson – just a little bit... weird.

 I have no problem with the religious phases or the elliptical remarks at award ceremonies,
though.  Eccentricity – all for it.  The part of Dylan I never understood was the love-song part.
The first album after the Christian period, Shot of Love, is to me much more puzzling than Slow
Train Coming and Saved.  What’s Dylan doing?  Is he just writing random love songs to people
who don’t exist?  We know it’s not Sara and Blood on the Tracks anymore -- that’s ancient history, even
though for many of us it’s the last data we have on the man’s personal life.  Of course, there are
two sides to the fact that Dylan leads a private life.  Maybe there are lots of women who have
been his muses, and all these love songs mean something real.

I don’t think so, though.  Tight Connection to my Heart?  Under Your Spell?  Come on.
Certainly the new, stylized songs – Moonlight, for example, on Love & Theft – are love songs as
stylistic objects much more than they are personal, bard-tradition confessions.  The point of
Moonlight is not whether there is a real woman that Bob Dylan is asking “Won’t you/Be with
me/Under the moonlight all alone?”  The point is that he’s a crooner – the immortality is in the
music.  This is not Dylan confessing – it’s him singing a self-consciously styled pop artifact.

Or is there more?  I want to suggest an audacious second theory of Bob Dylan.  The love
songs are to God.

Arrrgh!  No!  Say it isn't so!  If false, it's silly.  If true, it ruins every love song the man sings
– like You Light Up My Life after Debbie Boone revealed that it was for Jesus.  And, ugh!  Isn’t
this the sort of preposterous Dylanology that “scholars” in the Sixties used to publish as if each
new reading of Desolation Row was the next Isis Unveiled?

 Now, let me explain.  I don’t really mean that Dylan is singing every love song he sings
for God.  I mean that Dylan has cracked the blues code.  Singing about heartbreak and love is
really singing about suffering and life itself, whether the pain comes from slavery or Jim Crow or
any of the other pains that informed African American music.  Songs that say “The politicians are
cheaters, the environment is being destroyed” usually sound idiotic.  (Except for some Dylan
wrote, of course.)  But songs that say “You done and left me, my world’s gone wrong” capture
the pain.  They refract it through a common language that doesn’t try to explain the source of our
confusion so much as project it onto a set of standard terms and tropes that we all understand.  I
don’t want to know what crisis really is behind every singer who sings the blues – I want them to
tell me the Thrill is Gone and let me feel for myself the truth in the words, bringing to the show
all of my pain, which isn’t theirs.  Who believes that “Crossroads” is really about standing at an
intersection and trying to hitch a ride?  That’s what it’s about on one level, but on another it is
about being stranded far away from comfort, wasting away, being ignored by those around you.
We know this to be true, those of us who love the song, even if we’ve never hitchhiked before.
Because the song speaks the pain.  Love is how you sing about whatever hurts.

 Okay, now look at “Sugar Baby,” Dylan’s final statement on Love and Theft.  Part of the
song, like Things Have Changed, seems to be about the darkness (maybe fear of mortality,
maybe just sadness) that has animated so much of his best work these last few years:

  I've got my back to the sun 'cause the light is too intense
  I can see what everybody in the world is up against
  Can't turn back, you can't come back, sometimes we push too far
  One day you'll open up your eyes and you'll see where you are

But some of it seems to be directed at a woman ("Sugar Baby") that done him wrong:

  Your charms have broken many a heart and mine is surely one
  You got a way of tearin' the world apart, love, see what you've done
  Just as sure as we're livin', just as sure as you're born
  Look up, look up, seek your Maker, 'fore Gabriel blows his horn

I used to feel kind of let down that Dylan was just writing a love song in place of the grand
summation that was Highlands.  But this is the secret of the blues: it’s all the same hurt.  The
hurt from the woman, the hurt from the world.  And the love of the woman, the love of
the world.  Why are so many great songs about love, and so few about anything else?
There are exceptions – the 59th Street Bridge Song, Born to be Wild, Spanish Bombs.
But is it that hard for anything in the world to really rival love in its power to inspire art?

Or is it that love, as perhaps the only experience that we dream is open to every one of us,
is the language in which all delight is expressed, and the lens through which we view all sorrow?

 Now, some may not want to equate “the love of the world” with “the love of God.”  But I
sure do.  The God which I understand is felt, in part, through the radical amazement we
experience at the world.  When the chords play right and the drone kicks in, and the music takes
you to another place – that is a place I identify with God.   The “steep and lofty cliffs, That on a
wild secluded scene impress/Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect/The landscape with
the quiet of the sky.”

 It’s Wordsworth, not Dylan, but you get the point.  Except for those two Christian
albums, rare references to Judaism (mostly on Infidels and Oh Mercy), and the frequent religious
imagery like the bit in Sugar Baby above, Dylan’s usually elliptical about it.  I think the
closest Dylan ever came to expressing his religious outlook was John Wesley Harding, with its
Biblical metaphors and oblique tales of human good and evil.  (Not to mention the notorious
Yahweh acronym in the title, which Dylan denied having intended.)  There’s no direct talking of
God on JWH, but Frankie Lee & Judas Priest just feels like either a Biblical allegory.  Or at least a
fable.  The title track seems to be about a Christ figure. All Along the Watchtower, with its Biblical
images of apocalyse amid old-sounding references to modern sin.  Seems to be, feels like – Dylan is
evoking these resonances without speaking of them in a way that cheapens them into something
that can be expressed, bought and sold.

 And love – what better way to talk about the whole fucked-up world than love.  Who
cares if there’s a real woman who inspired lines like

    The ghost of our old love has not gone away
    Don't look like it will anytime soon
    You left me standing in the doorway crying
    Under the midnight moon

(Standing in the Doorway) There’s no better way to talk about depression and fear than this.  This
is being sensitive to the world, and how we relate to it, addressing it in the form of a person -- it
is what religion is about.  No better way to talk about yearning and hope than

     I'd go hungry, I'd go black and blue
     I'd go crawling down the avenue
     There's nothing that I wouldn't do
     To make you feel my love

even if what’s really on his mind cannot be expressed in our language, if Make You Feel My Love
is as much about wishing to be young again, and tired of being old, as Cold Irons Bound.  Think
about how many songs on the “death” album are ostensibly about love – the ones just mentioned,
Love Sick, Million Miles, Till I Fell in Love With You, Can’t Wait.  Many more than are about death either
directly (Trying to Get to Heaven) or indirectly (Highlands).  But when Dylan says “love sick,” he’s
telling us he’s “life sick.”  That’s why we care.

 And we can project whatever our own troubles are onto the words of love, because they
all seem to fit.  Because God is not only inherent in Wordsworth “motion and spirit that impels
all thinking things” but in love as well – because the bonds of love, if we are privileged ever to
feel them, are from the same root as the impossibly intricate designs of our world, and the moral
good we can feel, and the ecstasy we seek.  Love is more than just a placeholder for all the joys
and sorrows in the world – it is a close relative also.

 We are all searching for love and immortality, through our careers and our wars and our
families and our social clubs in drag disguise.  If we open ourselves to the possibility and quiet
the distractions, the world itself exudes something very close to it.  The knowing nod of the
moustachioed music man who looks out from the back cover of Love and Theft – that isn’t just
the nod of the con but the nod of one music lover to another, that something about the way we
talk and play is related to something about what makes life worth living.  This is as close to
religion as Gotta Serve Somebody ever got.  We know, you and I – he seems to be saying.  We
know that what we feel in the music, and what we sing about in the familiar words of love, is the
same thing, and it’s something we would never demean by speaking of it.
 
 
 

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