Bob Dylan: Love and Theft

Bob Dylan croaks and growls and nasally worms his way through Love and Theft – his first album of new songs since the Spammy Award winning (meaning nothing) Time Out of Mind in 1997. On Love and Theft, Dylan is re-using the blues and folk format that he’s been using since Highway 61 Revisited. The approach is mixed with a few pre-forties pop song structures. Unlike so much other music made by professional musicians elsewhere – this isn’t particularly compelling music all on its lonesome. Tight, professional, sometimes colorful, but not very compelling music. Dylan's voice isn’t quite as warm on Love and Theft as it was on Time Out of Mine, and the vocals start grating long before the words become comprehensible. Regardless of what you may have heard, it’s better to confront a Dylan album with lyrics in hand. Probably more than any other rock artist, Dylan’s success relies on the perfectly written lyric. When Dylan’s lyrics are light, or overly elusive, or off-hand, "Dylanesque, " musically speaking, becomes a stylistic shortcoming. Recently, Dylan’s homage to blues and folk classics on World Gone Mad and Good as I Been to You, and his Beatnik humor and blues languor on Time Out of Mind, were inspired enough to keep us listening. But it leaves a lot riding on Love and Theft – after all, if it doesn’t work – it may mean Dylan’s comeback was a fluke – one good self-penned album in a decade or more. Dylan deserves more that a rush to judgment (or does he – nobody else’s records get treated like your senile Grandfather does when he comes to visit – look at Gramps, he’s drooling – ain’t that cute – wipe his nose, cut his taters – sure do love our Grandpa). But some critics make it easy for the old boy. And maybe that’s not fair.

Rolling Stone Magazine is already starting with the accolades. You almost wonder if they have these things written before anybody hears the album. "Pull out the living legend’s ‘big comeback’ template and fill in Dylan’s name," the editor screams, and twenty minutes later you have the finished review before the doughnuts arrive. With Love and Theft, Rob Sheffield does the honors for Rolling Stone, and this time it sounds like he lifted everything from some old gushing Greil Marcus review of a Dylan album from years back.

Sheffield writes:

"The music evokes an America of masquerade and striptease, a world of seedy old-time gin palaces, fast cash, poison whiskey, guilty strangers trying not to make eye contact, pickpockets slapping out-of-towners on the back. Love and Theft comes on as a musical autobiography that also sounds like a casual, almost accidental history of the country. Relaxed, magisterial, utterly confident in every musical idiom he touches, Dylan sings all twelve songs in a voice that sounds older than he is, a grizzled con man croaking biblical blues and Tin Pan Alley valentines out of the side of his mouth while keeping one eye on the exit."

Dylan is the only performer I know who has been praised because he’s blown his voice completely. Sheffield’s description of what Dylan is doing is more evocative than what Dylan has actually done on Love and Theft. Sheffield writes with simple descriptive flair, whereas Dylan is an elusive, suggestive, erratic, uncomfortable and off-balance writer. He strenuously avoids evoking time and place and history by using language that destroys it with cryptic jump cuts, and surrealistic montage. Sometimes the mess is threaded together by a commanding idea (sometimes not). The effect can be irritating, or the effect can be pleasantly Dylanesque. Hyperbole like Sheffield’s is unfair when there are so many sixties’ artists who have pulled off some amazing feats of evocative history: there’s David Bowie’s Hours; Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s Songs for Drella (the video is a spell-binding work of art); not to mention Tom Waits’ work (whom Dylan seems to be imitating on "Po’ Boy" - one of the best songs on Love and Theft). Sheffield is preposterous in labeling the album "a casual, almost accidental history of the country" because he has to overlook the fact that most of the album isn’t about history at all ("Sugar Babe," "Cry Awhile," "Honest With Me," "Meet Me in the Moonlight," "Floater" (Too Much to Ask)," "Sad and Lonesome Day," "Bye and Bye" and "Summer Days," for instance).

Dylan’s strengths may be in this order: words, music, voice, melody. His melodies are never all that captivating because the sonority of his voice doesn’t flatter, or fill out, the contours of a melody line – kind of like fitting a very skinny hand into a very large glove – you don’t necessarily notice it’s there. As much as critics like to flatter his voice, many singers have better equipment. If the melodies aren’t exactly lit up by the presence of his voice, it sometimes works exactly the opposite with Dylan’s music and words. After pulling Dylan’s Love and Theft lyrics off the Net, a few of the songs caught on fire. Like "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum:"

		
		"Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee
				They're throwin' knives into the tree
				Two big bags of dead man's bones
				Got their noses to the grind stone
				Livin' in the Land of Nod
				Trustin' their fate to the hands of God
				They pass by so silently
				Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee"

At first Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are living in perfect harmony (ah, those brilliant Dylan rhymes), but they soon grow tired of each other. Dylan, like all of us, has grown up and above simply satirizing the complacent plight of the Tweedle Dums and Tweedle Dees of the world. Perhaps modern targets worthy of satire lie just out of our modern line of vision – so until a new prophet comes along, these will have to do. Craftily, and predictably, Dylan follows up Tweedle Dum with "Mississippi:"

				"Every step of the way, we walk the line
				Your days are numbered, so are mine
				Time is piling up, we struggle and we stray
				We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape"

In other words, even if we aren’t exactly Tweedle Dums, our choices may not be all that different, so let’s not get on that high horse, etc. But if the music comes alive on the first song, which rushes along on a shuffling, ahead-of-the-beat breakneck tempo that would be as commanding as "All Along the Watchtower" if the words contained any danger or urgency, the music on "Mississipi" just plugs along rather listlessly. The lyrics are philosophical, but it’s disturbing the way "Mississipi" starts with the downbeat quality noted in the lines above, then drifts towards a shipwreck metaphor that suggests a gracious Dylan:

			"Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
				I'm drowning in the poison, got no future, got no past
				But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
				I've got nothing but affection for all those who sailed with me"

The sentiment comes from nowhere. "Mississippi" doesn’t work as confessional, because we know Dylan too well, and this ain’t him babe. On the other hand, Dylan avoids nailing down characters, and on "Mississippi" the emotional effect once again is dispersed rather than focused. Better to just note this as an unevenly toned song (a lament with half-assed philosophical affirmations thrown in) from a writer who is sometimes not a very masterful lyricist (and you may interpret this as meaning Dylan is sometimes a bad lyricist, if you wish).

But let’s talk about the better things for awhile. The best written songs (from a lyric standpoint only), besides the aforementioned "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum" are "Po’ Boy," "Highwater," "Floater (Too Much to Ask)," and maybe "Bye and Bye." "Po’ Boy" is a ragged, meandering tune with the best lines and melody on the album:

			"Po' boy in a red hot town
						Out beyond the twinklin' stars
						Ridin' a first class train
						Makin' the rounds
						Try to keep from fallin' between the cars."
Or

						"Po' boy in the hotel called the Palace of Gloom
						Called down to room service, says 'send up a room’."

Dylan shows himself still in touch with folk fundamentalism in this tribute to poor boys everywhere, and he's sweet enough to include the poor girls, by throwing in a deft stanza about Ophelia.

Musically he’s most in touch with the folk-blues on "Highwater" with its banjo arpeggios and doomsday gravity. Unfortunately "Highwater" never focuses on anything definitive and perhaps that’s some of the problem with Dylan’s writing anymore – it’s all about a general condition and never about a definitive condition:

					"Highwater rising, six inches above my head
					Coffins droppin' in the street like balloons made out of lead
					Water poured into Vicksburg, don't know what I'm gonna do
					Don't reach out for me, she said, can't you see I'm drowning too
					It's rough out there
					Highwater everywhere."

The lyrics on "Highwater" will satisfy gothic, comic book hearts everywhere, but why doesn’t the music really catch on fire? Why can’t Dylan let the boys work out the jams, and kick this thing up so it becomes a multi-dimensional musical experience. There’s 77 minutes on a CD and Dylan’s only using 55 of them. "Highwater" is a little contrived – even down to that carefully placed banjo run in the middle that recalls some traditional folk ballad. It’s fun enough, though Dylan’s humor these days seems best when absurd, and a distant second best when wry – and wry humor permeates most of Love and Theft.

But not on "Floater (Too Much to Ask)" which recalls "Clothesline Saga" and "Watching the River Flow", but possibly outdoes them both in comic deadpan attitude:

  
					I keep listening for footsteps
					But I ain't never hearing any
					From the boat, I fish for bullheads
					I catch a lot, sometimes too many

					A summer breeze is blowin'
					A squall is setting in
					Sometimes it's just plain stupid
					To get into any kind of wind

					One of the boss' hangers-on
					Sometimes comes to call
					At times you least expect
					Tryin' to bully you, strongarm you, 
					Inspire you with fear
					It has the opposite effect

					My grandfather was a duck trapper,
					He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
					My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth,
					I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes

					I had 'em once, though I suppose
					To go along with all the ring dancing,
					Christmas carols and all the Christmas eves
					I left all my dreams and hopes
					Buried under tobacco leaves

And "Bye and Bye" has a ragged sort of contentment that seems pretty honest somehow.

		By and by, I'm breathin' a lover's sigh
				While I'm sittin' on my watch so I can be on time
		I		'm singin' love's praises with sugar coated rhyme
				By and by, on you I'm castin' my eye
				'm paintin' the town, swingin' my partner around
				Well I know who I can depend on, I know who to trust
				I'm watchin' the road, I'm studyin' the dust.

It’s a cute song, kinda swoony and delirious, with a few crafty twists.

On the other hand:

"Summer Days" and "Lonesome Day Blues" had me glancing back through Dylan albums to find the last song he wrote with these repetitive blues-line formats (i.e. "I've got a house on the hill, I got hogs out in the mud; I said, I've got a house on the hill, I got hogs all out in the mud) that qualify as a classic. I searched awhile and got tired. Both songs start with blistering music, but five minutes in and the train doesn’t slow down or speed up, and when the song ends, it might as well be starting over again. Nice changes, nice licks, mathematical exactitude, very little soul. Seldom is great music so totally bereft of musical personality.

Dylan strings images, incidents and philosophical observations through "Summer Days," Lonesome Day Blues," "Sugar Babe," "Cry Awhile," "Honest With Me," and "Mississippi" and the results are interchangeable. It’s like "Sad Eyed-Lady" again, but written with different chord changes, and musical approaches. Song by song, you can applaud the good lines and ignore the bad ones, but it’s hard to enjoy anything in total. Pop and rock is full of philosophy, only it’s not usually this humorless and dour. Although there are many signs of life in Dylan, and Love and Theft suggests that he will always be capable of writing some new classics, it’s doubtful that Dylan will ever escape his crabbed, willfully disjunctive, nature. To ignore this is to be blind to both his art and the art of other sixties' performers who in many ways transcend him.

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