It sounds like someone running out of time
Why Bob Dylan’s new album is the perfect soundtrack to 2020
Way out in the wilderness, or at least on Twitter, as the world dreamed fitful dreams with the pandemic-induced knowledge that leaving the house could turn you into a ticking time-bomb, a little after four o’clock in the morning on March 27th 2020, Bob Dylan made an announcement.
‘Murder Most Foul’ is Dylan’s first original song since 2012: a 17-minute masterpiece that would earn him his first US Billboard Number 1, six decades into his career. It was followed by Rough and Rowdy Ways: Dylan’s 39th studio album, which has been hailed among his very finest.
For a moment, in 2020, somehow everybody was talking about Bob Dylan. For fans, it felt triumphant.
Fans of Dylan have been through a lot. For the record, like most Dylan fans, I love the mixture, the contradictions. I’m happy to go where he takes me. The songwriter behind ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’, ‘Buckets Of Rain’ and ‘Mississippi’ also gave us ‘Wiggle Wiggle’, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I insist on playing Christmas In The Heart every year; my family usually insists on leaving the room. I delight in the strangeness of some of his adventures: the man who managed to send an audio recording of his Nobel Prize Lecture just in time to collect the prize money is the same man who showed up to appear in an impressively long list of commercials over the years, including advertisements for Apple, Chrysler, and of course, Victoria’s Secret.
Rough and Rowdy Ways treads familiar thematic ground. Death and mortality have been dominant themes in Dylan’s writing since at least 1997’s Time Out Of Mind. His last album of original songs, 2012’s Tempest, included two explorations of death through singular events that have taken on wider cultural significance: the sinking of the Titanic in the title track, and the murder of John Lennon in album-closer ‘Roll On, John’. But there’s something about ‘Murder Most Foul’, and the album as a whole, that just feels different.
‘Murder Most Foul’ begins with the shooting of JFK. The Narrator shape-shifts like Aladdin’s Genie: sometimes he’s the storyteller, sometimes he’s the President bleeding in his wife’s lap, sometimes he’s the killer or killers. He’s the crowd watching, then the lone voice of what ‘Someone said to me’ on the day it happened.
About halfway through the song, the President and the Narrator are speeding along in the car together, desperate for a salvation they both seem to know they won’t make it to:
Turn the radio on, don’t touch the dials,
Parkland Hospital only six more miles
Searching for some kind of comfort, they ask the DJ to play them a song. So begins a list of requests to ‘Play’ that lasts until the song’s conclusion.
I tried counting how many requests the Narrator makes, but I got lost after 53. Many are for specific musicians or songs: ‘Play John Lee Hooker, play ‘Scratch My Back’’; some are aimed at particular listeners: ‘Play ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ / Play it for the First Lady, she ain’t feeling any good’. Some sound delirious, like the Narrator’s brain is firing signals in random directions: ‘Play the numbers, play the odds’. Some aren’t music requests at all, they’re nods to silent clowns and gangsters: ‘Play Buster Keaton, play Harry Lloyd / Play Bugsy Siegel, play Pretty Boy Floyd’.
The requests multiply and multiply as the band behind Dylan sound like they’re coming apart, the drums gliding in and out of focus, the piano never quite reaching the resolution we want it to. It’s beautiful, and it’s deeply harrowing. The majority of people Dylan mentions have died. Overwhelmed by loss, our Narrator sounds like he’s collapsing. It sounds like someone running out of time.
‘How much longer can it last?
How long can it go on?’
- ‘Crossing The Rubicon’, Rough And Rowdy Ways, 2020
Dylan’s lyrics are often questions. Perhaps the most famous is the opening line of the chorus of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’: ‘How does it feel?’. On Rough And Rowdy Ways, there are lots of questions, mostly about death.
Since David Bowie died on 10 January 2016, two days after the release of his album Blackstar, I’ve felt a morbid anxiety at the arrival of new material from musical heroes over a certain age, especially if the album explicitly deals with mortality. Could this be it? Are they saying goodbye? Of course it’s not my business: I’m unlikely to ever meet Bob Dylan. If I did, I doubt I’d be able to put into words how much his music means to me, or that he’d be interested in anything I had to say. But when someone’s creativity matters so much, when their music has been there for you in moments of vulnerability and joy, the fear of them being gone is painful.
Of course, I hope Rough And Rowdy Ways is not Dylan’s final album. There are no signs that it will be, but perhaps my anxiety has been stoked this year. COVID-19 has brought with it a reminder of just how vulnerable we are; how does an artist of Dylan’s stature respond, if Rough And Rowdy Ways is a response at all? Well, in one of the album’s most beautiful songs, Dylan sings about committing to a partner after a tumultuous struggle, confessing ‘I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone’. The song is called ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You’, and the way Dylan sings stops you in your tracks. At the heart of Dylan’s persona is the mysterious trickster who can’t be pinned down, but there’s no shape-shifting here. The lyrics are as simple and vulnerable as it gets:
Lot of people gone, lot of people I knew.
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.
The album’s other treasures include the macabre ‘My Own Version Of You’, in which Dylan’s Narrator prowls around graveyards and mortuaries: ‘Looking for the necessary body parts / Limbs and livers and brains and hearts’, building a Creature, perhaps to save himself, possibly to wreak destruction. It’s melodramatic fun, with more than a dash of gallows-humour, and it includes a familiar reference.
Shakespeare has popped up in allusions throughout Dylan’s songwriting, and he takes a starring role in Rough And Rowdy Ways. Many of his plays are hinted at, but the entire record is stuffed full of Hamlet, from the title of ‘Murder Most Foul’ onwards. In ‘My Own Version Of You’, Dylan quotes the Prince of Denmark’s most famous line, when he asks:
Can you tell me what it means: To be or not to be?
You won’t get away with fooling me.
Who’s he talking to? Assuming he’s still rooting around among the corpses, perhaps the Narrator was inspired not only to quote Hamlet, but to adopt the famous theatrical pose: holding a skull, gazing into its eyes, asking it questions. This isn’t exactly parody: Hamlet was joking around too, holding the skull of the jester who made him laugh as a child, as he contemplated his and all of our inevitable fates. There’s a hair’s breadth between Shakespeare’s original, Dylan’s allusion, and the Morecambe and Wise ‘Shakesepeare’ routine, in which the comedians imagine an easier life performing ‘the serious stuff’, rather than having to write new jokes night after night. At the routine’s climax, Eric Morecambe, in full Hamlet-costume, asks his hand-held skull, ‘What do you think of it so far?’, before instantly turning the skull into a ventriloquist’s dummy, puppeteering its response: ‘Rubbish!’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMXz2SCqtfg
Dylan is talking to a skull, and perhaps he’s got his hand in its jaw to make it talk back. Behind one of our most archetypal images of mortality, there’s a dark, slapstick humour. Like Shakespeare’s Prince, Dylan may be overwhelmed by considerations of death, but he suggests you’d be a clown not to try and laugh back at the skull’s grinning.
‘How many deaths does it take till he knows
That too many people have died?’
- ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963
To say Dylan’s best lyrics are timeless is so obvious it’s almost meaningless: but for a song to capture the time it was written in so powerfully, and then to ask a question at the heart of the frightening situation the world is facing sixty years later, is fairly miraculous.
It’s 2020 and we’re in a speeding car. There may be help down the highway, but we may not make it in time. In any case, the journey will end one way. It’s terrifying.
In his last request on ‘Murder Most Foul’, the Narrator asks for a Bob Dylan song — the one we’ve just been listening to:
Play ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and ‘Dumbaroton’s Drums’,
Play darkness and death will come when it comes
Play ‘Love Me Or Leave Me’ by the great Bud Powell,
Play ‘The Blood-stained Banner’
Play ‘Murder Most Foul’
As the car speeds the President away, Dylan shyly wonders if his song will be counted with the greats. Of course, on November 22nd 1963, Dylan wasn’t in the car with the President. He was 23 years-old, a rising star but a long way from the towering figure he would become. He must have wondered how far he would go. 39 albums, concerts in the thousands, one Nobel Prize, one Billboard Number 1 (so far), a quite bizarre Victoria’s Secret advert, and 57 years later, he’s ready to sing about that day. Things have changed, but the question hasn’t. Dylan still dares us to ask: ‘How does it feel?’. How lucky we are to have his music in the car with us.
