Bob Dylan: Love and Theft
Sony Music
Playing Time: 57:32
D. Malcolm Fairbrother
'Bob
Dylan will not be meeting with the press during this tour.’Sigh!
It had been well worth the attempt, but in retrospect, it was
the answer I should have anticipated. Here is one artist who
has made it profoundly clear that he has little interest in
discussing the past or dissecting his previous works. Here is
a man who has allowed his songs to speak for themselves, yet
has willingly reinvented them in performances as diverse and
illogical as the many personae this iconic artist has tested
during a multi-faceted career that spans over forty years and
encompasses forty-three albums, give or take a bootleg or two.
Here is a man who has overcome a severe accident, who has been caught up in the religious turbulence of finding, changing and losing his faith -- all the while being idolized himself by a significant chorus of critics and fans. Here is a man who has withstood divorce, public scrutiny of the most invasive kind, the onslaught of a myriad of new musical directions, and the crisis of turning sixty years old in the main aisle of the pop music supermarket....what else is there for him to say?
Plenty, it seems, given the brilliance with which Dylan unveils twelve stunning new songs on his extraordinary new opus, Love And Theft. The strengths of this collection are many. From the first song, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the artist's love of imagery and command of the language soars. Dylan's skill of sharpening dull clichés into razor-edged insights by juxtaposing them in curious yet clever arrays of cascading surrealism has rarely been more advantageously used. The music fairly churns along with all the raucous confidence of an inside joke, a winking exchange between a veteran performer and an audience thrilled with the familiarity of the technique. What does it all mean? Why...nothing much, or maybe more than meets the ear. But isn't that the beauty of many a Dylan song, the countless arguments that exist within the spaces between the words? Mississippi struts forward with an elegant confidence, an anthemic ode to perseverance and survival against the endless struggle that highlight our numbered days. This rendition strengthens a song that is itself a survivor from the sessions that evolved into Time Out Of Mind, Dylan's previous work, critically acclaimed as it addressed themes similar to those found in Love And Theft, although with a much more ominous tone, and with little of this recent work's capricious playfulness. Last time out, Dylan heeded the advice of his producer, the gifted Daniel Lanois; this time, he avoids such genial conflicts by serving as his own producer under the mischievous moniker, 'Jack Frost'.
Dylan romps from style to style with ease. Summer Days, a rollicking taste of jive that swings and jumps evocatively, its energetic protagonist cruising in a convertible full of summer-girls, his pockets full of money, but his eye is on the rearview mirror where summer fades as he chooses to celebrate what was, not bemoan what is disappearing. It is an allegory for the aging boomer who roars rather than totters into the inevitable sunset. Bye And Bye is one of several songs that evoke memories of a more innocent time, a time of lawn strollers and first-time lovers; the vaudevillian crooner is effectively mimicked by Dylan both as a lyricist and in his warbling delivery. Moonlight is another song that fairly demands a singer decked out in a straw 'boater' and twirling a cane as he soft-shoes across a sawdust-strewn stage. Floater (Too Much To Ask) visits similar territory; it could serve as the soundtrack to a psychedelic cartoon narrated by a cleverly verbose cynic.
Before its release, Dylan referred to this collection as masterpieces that nobody had heard as of yet, and his words fall not far from the bulls-eye. High Water growls ominously, an undercurrent of menace and foreboding. Its message of impending destruction and the arduous task of sorting out answers to unfathomable questions seems prophetic given recent events in a turbulent world, events that give an immediacy and a relevance to Dylan's masterful commentary. Almost equally unforgettable is Po' Boy, vaudvillian and bitter-sweet, its broad humour barely disguising the pain of poverty...a classic evocation of modern want masked as a depression-era hobo ditty. Honest With Me is a pounding rocker with a driven, kick-ass delivery and a twisted sense of humour that smoothly alternates between frivolous word-play and the acumen of razor-like sarcasm.
Cry A While juggles rhythms and tempos effectively to produce yet another gem mined from familiar territory, the blues, yet skilfully rendered fresh and invigorating by the artist's willingness to playfully bend the format into something noteworthy. With a voice as old as the genre itself, Dylan snarls out a standard blues-rock hybrid on Lonesome Day Blues, complete with the trademark Bob Dylan whine, now delivered with a self-mocking wink. Sugar Babe is a long, slow shrug of a song, as bitter in delivery and as wry in tone as its title is sweet in its deception. It is a fitting conclusion, almost an afterthought, to a varied and energetic collection of engaging tunes.
Last time around, Bob Dylan's message was the weary resignation of the realization that 'it's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there.' This time we get the energy of the aging troubadour/poet who urges us to rage against the ravages of time, and, as he has done so many times before, who gives us the accompanying soundtrack to another stage of our lives.
November 8, 2001
Hard on the heels of his stunning new work, Love And Theft (reviewed above), Bob Dylan ambled out onto the stage of this cavernous sporting arena and, without so much as a nod to the crowd, he began to pull his audience in close with a timely selection of songs delivered with vigor and passion.
With such a vast catalog at his fingertips, he expertly juggled numbers from the early sixties with recent offerings, rarely heard gems taking their places prominently alongside familiar numbers, folk underscoring rock, and the blues underscoring everything. It was nothing less than a State-Of-The-Nation address by the master to his appreciative devotees whose ages spanned five decades. True, there were more potbellies than potheads, and the former long-hairs had wistfully become those longing for hair -- but for two hours and forty minutes, none of that mattered.
What mattered was the music and the man. As is his wont, he chose to let his song selection speak volumes about his take on recent world affairs while he remained his taciturn self between numbers. One knew what was on his mind when he opened with This World Can¹t Stand Long, then slid immediately into The Times They Are A Changing, both songs delivered with a reflective and moody understatement. It was the harmonica solo in the latter number that drew in the audience and produced the first of many sustained ovations. The band seemed to catch this energy and breathed new life into spirited renditions of Desolation Row, Your Turn To Cry and Just Like A Woman.
By now Mr. Dylan and his band (Larry Campbell bouncing smoothly between a multitude of instruments, Charlie Sexton providing crunching and searing guitar licks, Tony Garnier plucking away on bass, and David Kemper punctuating it all with a variety of delicious drum rhythms) had built up a full head of steam as they ground out a steamy High Water, then followed up with vigorous renditions of the surreal Maggie's Farm and the prophetic A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall: although the line 'I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children' was penned almost forty years ago (!), it was never truer than it is today when applied to the gang-infested urban landscape, or the adolescent armies fighting in hell-holes around the world.
The main set of fourteen songs continued to intermingle the old and the new, as Tangled Up in Blue found the band reaching down deep for extra energy and finding it; then it was Summer Days driving the audience up onto its collective feet as sporadic outbursts of dancing erupted. The band's faux-finale (for what else can a song be called when it concludes with the band waving their farewells and leaving the stage to a sea of 'Bic beacons' and undulations of adulation -- then returning for an encore that was a full seven songs long) found Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 reviving that quaint Sixties phenomenon of partnerless acid dancers in their early twenties joyously waving their arms in free-form ecstasy...ironic in that the song to which they gyrated was a hit some dozen or more years before their births!
The Academy Award-winning Things Have Changed led off the final fantastic round of performances as poetry put on her dancing shoes and kicked up her heels throughout the arena. The audience was not denied the songs they had come to hear: an infectiously boogie that was Highway 61, the anthemic Like A Rolling Stone (How does it feel, Bob? Why as fresh and bitingly sarcastic as the first time you sang it!), the hopeful Forever Young (and didn¹t we sing it as if the singing of it would somehow make it come to pass and we would stay forever young?), and the pensive Blowin' In The Wind somehow kept just this side of the territory of clichés by the pitifully small-minded visions of so many of our fellow humans. The final number was the apocalyptic All Along The Watchtower during which the generous Dylan acknowledged the appropriateness if not the superiority of the late Jimi Hendrix' blistering take on his original folk-lilting rendition by letting the band blast away at their instruments with the kind of energy that tells the audience that there is not much left and that they all will soon be spent.
Still, the audience called out for more; but, as the house lights came up, we were left with the feeling, not so much that for a couple of hours the hands on the face of the clock of time had been briefly turned back to a long gone youth, as that it was wonderful to be going into a future wherein the music of this sexagenarian was still a vital part of what we had become.
