21st Century Dylan

In anticipation of the impending release of Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways [June 19^th – today!], Rolling Stone polled their staff to compile their list of what they think are Dylan’s twenty-five best songs from the 21^st century.  Of course, Rolling Stone being Rolling Stone, they got the list only half right.  Several of their picks come from the last three Dylan albums, all the songs of which are covers that are somehow related to Frank Sinatra, and one is a Christmas song.  Sorry, if you’re going to compile a list of songs by Bob Dylan, at least make the effort to make sure they’re written by Bob Dylan.  Here is my “one pinhead’s point of view” list.  I have only two criteria – the songs must have been written by Bob Dylan, and the songs have to be released after Jan 1, 2000 [I know – there is debate whether 2000 is part of the 21^st century, but that’s another argument…]. 

Bob Dylan experienced somewhat of a creative rebirth in 1997 with Time Out of Mind.  Since then, he hasn’t been trying to keep up with the musical Jones’s.  Before then, he released two albums of old songs that inspired him – Good as I Been to You [1992] and World Gone Wrong [1993].  He confessed in his memoir Chronicles that he could no longer relate to his own songs.  He went back in time for inspiration, the folk and blues songs that inspired him as a youth.  Everything after Time Out of Mind has a weird, old-timey feeling that screams “roots”.  He fell back onto the styles of electric blues, folk, jazz, Western swing, rockabilly, rag time music, and 19^th century balladry.  All those musical styles that fall under the ‘Americana’ tag you’ll find on Dylan’s albums from ‘Love & Theft’ onward. I don’t have an order of preference, so I copped out and made my list chronological.

Things Have Changed [The Essential Bob Dylan, 2000] – One of the smartest things Dylan ever did when recording new songs was to dispense with studio musicians and record with his touring band.  He also decided to produce himself under the pseudonym “Jack Frost.”  Instead of laboring for days over a single song, Dylan became more of a Zen artist – he and the band would record two, maybe three takes of a song, with the arrangement of each take being different from the last.  Dylan’s production gives his musicians room to breathe.  The arrangements are uncluttered.  That style of recording began with this song, which was created for the movie Wonder Boys.  The song won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.  Dylan has used his Oscar as a stage prop ever since [I’ve seen it].

Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, Mississippi, Lonesome Day Blues, High Water [for Charley Patton], Honest With Me, Cry A While [‘Love & Theft’, 2001] – Many of Dylan’s good or near-great albums since 1975 have been hailed as “his best since Blood on the Tracks.”  I’ve written elsewhere in these spaces that ‘Love & Theft’ is that album.  Gone are the ambience and atmospherics of the Lanois productions. With ‘Love And Theft’ we get Dylan without any frills. He took his road band into the studio this time. These guys [including Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton on guitar, Tony Garnier on bass, David Kemper on drums] had been touring with Dylan on his “Never Ending Tour” for years, so they instinctively knew what he wanted. What he got was a combination of jazz, swing, hard roadhouse blues [Lonesome Day Blues], country [High Water (for Charley Patton)], rockabilly [Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum], ballads and some of the hardest rock one has heard from Dylan in a long time [Honest With Me].  Mississippi has three different released versions – one on ‘Love & Theft’, the other two on Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006.  I think Dylan got it right when he put out the ‘Love & Theft’ version first.

Down in the Flood & Cold Irons Bound [Masked and Anonymous soundtrack, 2003] – In 2003, Dylan made a film about a “post-apocalyptic, mythological third-world America” that was in the midst of a civil war. Dylan played the character Jack Fate, a rock legend who was released from prison to perform some kind of benefit concert.  It’s a very strange film, but Dylan and his road band were featured.  They played four songs in the movie, but these two songs absolutely smoked.  Cold Irons Bound was from 1997’s Time Out of Mind, while Down in the Flood goes all the way back to The Basement Tapes with The Band.  Yes, they are live versions of older songs, but they are a “must have” for serious Dylan listeners.  They also meet my criteria for inclusion on this list.

Thunder on the Mountain, Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Someday Baby, Ain’t Talkin’ [Modern Times, 2006] - Thunder on the Mountain sees Dylan as full of piss and vinegar as any song from ‘Love & Theft’.  I’m not sure why Alicia Keys was on his mind, but other things are going on here, and it doesn’t sound fun:

Gonna raise me an army, some tough sons of bitches

I'll recruit my army from the orphanages

I been to St. Herman's church and I've said my religious vows

I've sucked the milk out of a thousand cows

I got the pork chops, she got the pie

She ain't no angel and neither am I

Shame on your greed, shame on your wicked schemes

I'll say this, I don't give a damn about your dreams

Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be

Mean old twister bearing down on me

All the ladies of Washington scrambling to get out of town

Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down

Everybody's going and I want to go too

Don't wanna take a chance with somebody new

I did all I could and I did it right there and then

I've already confessed, no need to confess again

Rollin’ and Tumblin’ finds Dylan using a musical arrangement that has been used plenty other old blues songs [Howlin’ Wolf’s Meet Me in the Bottom, Muddy Waters’ own version of Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Robert Johnson’s If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day, and so on…], but I’m quite sure Muddy Waters wouldn’t use the phrase “some lazy slut has charmed away my brains…”  At first I thought Someday Baby was a knock-off of Trouble No More.  It uses the same first verse and the chorus, but other than that it’s a different song.  There are two versions – that which was released on Modern Times, and a radically-different version [which I prefer] that came out two years later on Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006.  Ain’t Talkin’ has the same release history as Someday Baby, and like that song I prefer the later version.

Dreamin' of You, Red River Shore, Marchin’ to the City - [Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Rare and Unreleased 1989-2006, 2008] – Recorded in 1997, these are outtakes from Time Out of Mind, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to them.  Daniel Lanois produced that album, and his production gave that album a hazy, spooky feeling.  That atmosphere isn’t present on these three songs [well, maybe a little].  These songs have the “no frills” feeling of the songs from ‘Love & Theft’.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, It’s All Good [Together Through Life, 2009] - Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ is a minor chord blues with mariachi horns and guitar from Mike Campbell.  David Hidalgo’s accordion [and the occasional violin] gives the entire album a bit of a Tex-Mex feel.  Dylan always did like Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet. It’s All Good is all chaos and could’ve been written yesterday. Lying politicians [nothing new here], widows and orphans, cold-blooded killers, cop cars in bad neighborhoods [kinda like today!], people “so sick they can hardly stand” [and this ten years before COVID].  It’s a world that gets darker and more scary with each successive verse.  But don’t worry about all this bad stuff, because “it’s all good.” Sarcasm at its very best.

Duquesne Whistle, Narrow Way, Pay in Blood, Scarlet Town, Early Roman Kings [Tempest – 2012]. The video for Duquesne Whistle is pretty violent.  It starts out innocently enough with a guy who sees a girl to whom he’s attracted, steals a rose from a sidewalk flower stand, and gives her the flower.  Soon after, some kidnappers grab him off the street, beat the shit out of him, and then turn him loose.  But at least the video does follow the narrative about this guy wanting to follow this girl anywhere she wanted to go.  Narrow Way is the story of every couple who splits up…Dylan is not happy about it.  This song has another blues-standard riff that I just can’t place, but I know I’ve heard it before somewhere.  Pay in Blood drips with contempt for some woman who had done him wrong. Some unnamed women were similarly skewered in Like a Rolling Stone or Idiot Wind.

“I could stone you to death for the wrongs that you done/Sooner or later you make a mistake,

I'll put you in a chain that you never will break/Legs and arms and body and bone

I pay in blood, but not my own.”

“Another politician pumping out the piss/Another angry beggar blowing you a kiss/You’ve got the same eyes that your mother does/If only you can prove who your father was…”

Scarlet Town – I don’t know where Scarlet Town is, but I know that I don’t want to live there.  This song has a rarity for any Dylan song – a guitar solo.  Early Roman Kings is something I’ve heard before, back when it was called Mannish Boy [or Bo Diddley’s I’m a Man – take your pick].  David Hidalgo’s accordion plays the Mannish Boy start-stop riff where you’d expect to hear a harmonica.  Who are these “early Roman kings” in their sharkskin suits?  Are they the Wall Street bankers who are “too big to fail”?  Whoever they are, Dylan calls them out –

They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers/They buy and they sell/They destroyed your city/They’ll destroy you as well/They’re lecherous and treacherous/Hell-bent for leather/Each of ‘em bigger/Than all of them put together

Goodbye Jimmy Reed, False Prophet [Rough and Rowdy Ways, 2020] - Rough and Rowdy Ways is out today, and all week I’ve been reading rave reviews of the album’s greatness.   Once again critics have reverted to hyperbole when it comes to Bob Dylan.  Over and over I’ve been reading “it’s the greatest thing since…”  I’m not hearing the same album they are.  A good chunk of the album crawls by.  There are two exceptions - Goodbye Jimmy Reed is a blues stomper that’s absolute class.  If you close your eyes, this one will take you back to Leopard Skin Pill-Box Hat [1966]. False Prophet is another Dylan blues which borrows [a lot – others would say ‘stolen,’ but that’s the “folk process” for you] from If Lovin' Is Believing by Billy ‘the Kid' Emerson.  Lyrically, this sounds like a continuation of Early Roman Kings, and he sounds equally annoyed.  Here he says he’s "the enemy of the unlived meaningless life" – a comment on reality television, perhaps? 

I was tempted to include Murder Most Foul, but given the praise that’s been heaped upon it, that was too easy of a kill.  I like it, but I don’t want to sit through seventeen minutes of American cultural history very often.  It sounds more like an epic poem than it does a proper song.