Bob Dylan wrote and sang those words on “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only
Bleeding)” from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. He was
24 years old. But unlike similarly youthful rock-and-roll pronouncements (Pete
Townshend’s “Hope I die before I get old,” for instance), Dylan has
stuck to it, embodying the sentiment throughout his career.
Dylan may well be our most prominent living musician, but he’s never
acted like it, following his own restless muse for nearly 40 years now. What
is heroic about Dylan isn’t merely his refusal to rest on his laurels but his
refusal to even acknowledge those laurels to begin with. His career, like the
American music he is so synonymous with, has been a constant act of
rebirth.
But the lyric could also be a credo for Willie Nelson, eight years
Dylan’s elder and his only real competition for Greatest Living Repository of
American Song. Dylan and Nelson have had similarly prolific resurgences over
the last decade. Dylan recaptured his muse with a couple of compelling cover
albums, 1992’s Good As I Been To You and 1993’s better World Gone
Wrong, before setting off on his still-going-strong Neverending Tour,
capping off his return to glory with 1997’s universally hailed Time Out of
Mind. Nelson rebounded from well-chronicled tax problems with 1993’s
Across the Borderline and has issued an astounding 18 albums since,
tackling a variety of genres on a variety of labels seemingly with no concern
for the music’s commercial prospects.
Where most rock and country artists of their generation constantly
recycle the past with greatest-hits tours or stick to tepid, conservative
attempts to recapture their past glories (“Every record that I’m
making/Is like a record that I’ve made/JUST NOT AS GOOD,” as Randy Newman
sang on his great ode to geezer-rock, “I’m Dead [But I Don’t Know
It]”), these grand pop-music senior citizens have been busy being
born.
As it happens, Dylan and Nelson have recently released new albums that
are not only remarkable but remarkably similar. Dylan’s “Love And
Theft” is an album of originals that plays like a loose tribute to
pre-rock American pop, hinting that it’s far from coincidence that Dylan’s
title comes from writer Eric Lott’s highly regarded history of the minstrel
tradition. Nelson’s Rainbow Connection, on the other hand, is almost
all covers, a collection of kiddie music and novelty songs. These records are
casual almost to a fault, so lazy and breezy that some will undoubtedly
mistake this relaxation for slightness. In addition to being imbued with a
deep reverence for American song traditions, both records are just as profound
for how deeply funny they are, daring to be frivolous. Nelson opens his record
with the title song, lifted, of course, from The Muppet Movie. Dylan
starts with a bit of carnival blues called “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle
Dum.”
The records also share the circumstances of their production. There was
no indication that a new Dylan album was coming until a few months ago. Dylan
seems to have recorded the album with his road band (along with guest
keyboardist Augie Meyers) between regular gigs. Rainbow Connection was
recorded last Christmas at Nelson’s home studio with his road band and
daughters — family all. Both men have made music on a nightly basis for years
with the same bands, and this intimacy and comfort carry over to these albums
like little else they’ve recorded.
Both records are also subtly autumnal — with aging as a subtext tackled
with wit and wisdom. What is perhaps most brave and beautiful about
“Love And Theft” and Rainbow Connection is the way
Dylan and Nelson meet mortality with a grin and a chuckle. Dylan makes this
plain on one of the album’s most invigorating songs, the raucous rockabilly
raveup “Summer Days.” “Summer days and summer nights are
gone,” Dylan howls, then he answers his own plaint with a shout: “I
know a place where there’s still something going on.”
Though it’s been greeted with some great early press (a rare five-star
review in Rolling Stone and a just-as-rare “A+” from The
Village Voice‘s Robert Christgau), I doubt “Love And
Theft” will match the accolades or album sales of Time Out of Mind
— but it’s a better record.
With its foreboding, atmospheric production from Daniel Lanois and its
serious, sometimes morbid tone, Time Out of Mind announced its
profundity, and most listeners took it at its word. Time Out of Mind
is a great record, but it’s also the kind of great record for putting
on the shelf and admiring. “Love And Theft” is a great record
for listening to and singing along with. It doesn’t come with the comfortable
sonic and conceptual reassurances of seriousness and class that made
Time such a prestige item and thus — to its credit, frankly — won’t
be winning any Grammys.
But it reminds us, like nothing has in years, that Dylan’s greatness
always lay more in his lyrical wit, expressively unprofessional vocals,
and natural musicality than in the weighty pronouncements that got him labeled
the Voice of a Generation. It reminds us that, along with Newman and Chuck
Berry, he’s one of the funniest rock-and-rollers ever.
In spirit, “Love And Theft” is Blonde on Blonde
meets The Basement Tapes — hilariously caustic one-liners meet lazy,
lovely, mysterious Americana. Where Time Out of Mind was as much an
idea as an album, “Love And Theft” rewards obsessive
listening with the warm, open tone of the music, the freeness, indeed the
wildness, of the vocals, and the consistent good humor of the lyrics. On the
bass-driven “Lonesome Day Blues,” Dylan’s over-the-top growl carries
audible joy, leering to a lover “You’re gonna need my help,
sweetheart/You can’t make love all by yourself!” On the moon-June-spoon
“Bye and Bye,” Dylan gets borscht-belt, cracking, “I’m sitting
on my watch/So I can be on time.” And that’s before he tells a knock-
knock joke and issues a “booty call.” Some moments, like the
regretful ballad “Mississippi” and the album-closing “Sugar
Baby,” are more reflective, but these moments wouldn’t be as poignant
without the rest of the album’s freewheelin’ spirit.
Rainbow Connection is even more poignantly, pointedly juvenile.
Nelson brings out the whole crew for a family sing-along (and whistle-along)
of “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.” The traditional dog song
“Ol’ Blue” reprises a tune Nelson first remembers hearing when his
grandmother sang it to him at the age of 4. Nelson’s daughter Amy joins him
for the children’s song “Playmate.” Nelson dives into “I’m My
Own Grandpa,” a novelty song for all ages, with great gusto. His best
album since 1996’s spare, gorgeous Spirit, Rainbow Connection is
one of the funniest, warmest family reunions you’ll ever hear. It slides off
the tracks at the end with predictable weirdness — two straight covers of
Mickey Newbury curiosities “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My
Condition Was In)” and “The Thirty-Third of August.” But before
it does so, Nelson offers the album’s only original, a new standard. A better,
truer sequel to his “On the Road Again,” the great “Wouldn’t
Have It Any Other Way” is a credo that sums up this latest chapter in the
careers of both of these bus-riding troubadours:
“We play our songs and play our old guitars/And it don’t really
matter where we are.
We wake up in a new world every day/
And we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
local beat
by CHRIS HERRINGTON
Coming off the successful return of its trademark Memphis Music and
Heritage Festival, the Center for Southern Folklore is attempting to
beef up its schedule with a new weekly dinner theater production, Beale
Street Saturday Night.
Essentially a one-woman show featuring noted local singer Joyce
Cobb (who devised the concept for the show, which is written and directed
by E. Frank Bluestein and produced by center director Judy Peiser) and a five-
piece backing band, the show was originally a two-hour program produced a
couple of years ago that was performed for school groups and toured. It has
been scaled down to a little over an hour, with a Southern buffet dinner
preceding the performance. Tickets for the dinner and show are $39.95.
The show is an overview of the history of Memphis music, with narration
by Cobb interspersed with musical performances. The center gave its second
public performance of Beale Street Saturday Night last week. Cobb and
crew were a little tentative in the early moments but soon found their
footing.
After a brief introduction, the show begins its narrative with slave
songs and spirituals, featuring a medley that includes “Down By the
Riverside.“ The show then proceeds through the early history
of Beale Street (juxtaposing Memphis icons W.C. Handy and Boss Crump with a
reading of Handy’s “Mr. Crump’s Blues”), the first generation
of female blues singers that have obviously influenced Cobb, and the era of
cotton and Jim Crow.
Cobb sounded great during the section on female blues singers. Her
section on Bessie Smith, with saxophone player Sonny Williams as
sidekick, was a particular highlight. But Cobb sounded a little out of her
element on the field-hand songs of cotton and Crow, performing the standard
“Cotton Fields.“ This section, however, featured the
best of the night’s many instrumental showcases with drummer Terry
Saffold‘s crowd-pleasing brush stick and tin washpan solo (the other
members of this fine band are J.T. Page on piano, Charles
Johnson on bass, and Ken Dinkins on guitar).
Cobb highlights the postwar Beale era with strong performances of the
Elvis-identified “Good Rockin’ Tonight,“ played and
sung the way original artist Wynonnie Harris might have played it on Beale
Street, and B.B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone.“
A long section on Elvis is awkward but fun, with Cobb aping the King’s
hip twist, lip twitch, and the scarf-throwing that he would add during the
Vegas years. After a tribute to Rufus Thomas via an audience-participation
version of “Funky Chicken,“ Cobb finds her peak in a
tribute to three women whom she calls the “divas of Beale Street,”
offering stylistically convincing and forceful takes on Mavis Staples
(“Respect Yourself”), Ann Peebles (“I Can’t Stand the
Rain”), and Carla Thomas (“Gee Whiz”).
An inevitable finale of “Walking in Memphis” is
anticlimactic but an obvious and probably useful way of wrapping up the show
for the tourists who seem to be the core audience.
The $39.95 admission price may be too steep for a lot of people, but the
show does deliver.
Beale Street Saturday Night will take the next two weeks off but
will return on Thursday, October 4th, and is scheduled to run every Thursday
night thereafter, with dinner staring at 7 p.m. and the show at 8 p.m.