Lorsque Bergman jette, comme ici, un regard sur sa vie, c'est un homme profondément marqué par une éducation rigide et par une imagination débordante qui parle. Mais c'est surtout un homme de spectacle : à la fois directeur de théâtre et réalisateur de films, il a vécu dans la fièvre, entre moments de grâce et échecs. Il s'exprime sans complaisance dans ses jugements, qu'il s'agisse d'inconnus, de vedettes - telles que Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo ou Herbert von Karajan, avec qui il a travaillé -, ou de lui-même. Mémoires, ou plutôt antimémoires, "confessions" modernes, ce livre témoigne de blessures et de crises, mais aussi de rêves et de bonheurs, et il foisonne de souvenirs d'un étrange rayonnement.
My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle.
Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.
I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.
Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
Ingmar Bergman solves a problem...
Suddenly I have the solution: a tracking shot. A tracking shot round the actors, past the extras, tracking. Tarkovsky is always tracking round in every scene, the camera flying in all directions. I actually think it an objectionable technique, but it solved my problem, time passes...
Laterna Magica, page 173.
Ingmar Bergman on cinema...
When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE TOUCH, FACE TO FACE and so on.
Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. Melies was always there without having to think about it. He was a magician by profession.
彼は山から降りてくるときにやって来ますが、2012年にリリースされた『Tempest』以来、彼が遠くにいたと主張するのはかなり無理があります――スタジオリリースが3回、ブートレッグシリーズが7回、ライブ録音のボックスセットが2回、そして「50th Anniversary Edition」コンピレーションが5本、合計で120本以上です（!!!）新旧の、これまでリリースされなかった録音、交互のテイクとアウトテイク、スタジオ&ライブを収録したディスクを収録したディスクが、ほぼ600公演と組み合わされ、多くのリライトされた楽曲、スコセッシ監督の「Rolling Thunder Revue」映画、「Mondo Scripto」のリリース、絵画やポートレート、銃声の入った車のドアに関する長い展示（!!!）、リビジョニストアートや鉄細工、驚きと示唆に富む「Musicares Person of the Year」スピーチ、そしてもちろん、すでに47枚のディスクに収録された多数の作品が収録された「The Complete Album Collection, Volume One」、インタビュー、そしてタルサでの圧倒的なボブ・ディラン・アーカイブのオープニングが収録されています。ノーベル賞の演説とノーベル賞の講演、そしてフランスのレジオン・ド・オナーを加えると、過去8年間がそれほど静かではなかったことを改めて実感いたします。これは、ディランが2020年6月に「Rough And Rowdy Ways」をリリースした際の需要と期待の興味深い強さを強調するためであり、期待はさらに3つのティーザー「Murder Most Foul」「I Contain Multitudes」「False Prophet」によってさらに高まりました。これは、ディランがビルボードチャートのトップにランクインした初の楽曲のうち最初の曲であり、コロンビア・レコーディング・アーティストとしてデビューしてから58年後のものです。彼は本当に風にゆっくりと燃えるろうそく、あの若きディランのようです――決して消えることはありません。6月19日が奴隷制度廃止を祝う日であることは偶然かもしれませんが、それでも運命の素敵な彩りです。ディランの人種差別に対する闘いは常に彼の仕事の一部であり、2012年のインタビューで彼は人種差別を「狂気の極致」と呼び、常に米国を足止めしてきた病と呼んでいます。近頃、彼は正しいことが証明されています。預言者であろうとそうでないと、彼がやって来ます。
「私にとって未来はすでに過去のものです」――これは2001年の「Love And Theft」に収録された「Bye And Bye」の歌詞です。このアルバムでは、彼は「I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past」も歌っています。たとえ語り手が同じでなくても、時間は思いの中に出入りします。約20年前に書かれた歌では、年齢は重みを持ちません。それが何を意味するのかは、未来は過去のものであり、2001年のディランの作品の新たな段階は、彼が愛した伝統を解き明かす作品であり、スクルージ・マクダックが金銭箱に潜るようにそれに没頭するものでした。しかし、違いは、$crooge が欲張りである点で、ディラン氏はアルバムでもステージでも観客に自らの発見を惜しみなく共有しています。2001年以降、彼は前ロックジャンルの伝統を再び体験し、復活させ、クリスマスアルバムも投入し、偉大で神秘的な「Tempest」（2012年）で締めくります。常に音楽的インスピレーションと詩的なアイデア、ひねりを盗む紳士であり、シェイクスピアとオウィディッドとホーマー、ヘンリー・ティムロッド、エドガー・アラン・ポーをウィリー・ディクソン、ハムボーン・ウィリー・ニューベルン、メンフィス・ミニーと混ぜ合わせ、歌・思考・音楽という独自のディラネスクな煮込みを再び作り出します。その全体の食事、点をつなぎ線を繋げ、線を拡げるジャムバラヤは、無限にそれ以上の意味を持ちます。成分の多様性過去は彼の過去ではなく、彼の未来であり、彼はそれを克服し、再び感情をもって、ついにもう一つ登る山に挑みました。『The Great American Songbook』は、多くの場合、そして多くの人にとって、無生物の「ムザック」へと変わっていたスタンダードに命と魂を吹き込み、ディランがそれらを解き明かし、「最も胸が張り裂けるような曲のいくつか」を録音し、「墓から光へと持ち上げる」よう、上品な編曲と絶妙なフレーズで、数年前には考えもよらないボーカルスタイルとトーンの呼吸制御でアメリカ音楽の旅を完結させました。それでも、彼は再び相応しく、ボブ・ディランが歌手としての完璧な傑作で多くの批評家やファンを苛立たせ、動揺させました。その点は彼がただ指摘せざるを得なかった、そして彼はそれを実行した。人々は私が歌えないと言いますか？彼は皮肉を込めて、Musicares Speech（2015）で「I croak?」と言います。カエルのように聞こえますか？...私の声が撃たれたのですか？「私には声がない...」と、彼が常に批評家の意見に注意深く耳を傾けてきたことを私たちに保証し、今日『Shadows In The Night』のリリース後に誇り高く立ち、歌手兼パフォーマーとしての彼の特別かつ唯一無二の才能の生きた証であり、彼自身が媒介者として、読むべきではなく、聞くべき曲を私たちに届けてくれました。2年後のノーベル講演で彼が指摘したように、もちろん、彼自身の歌が文学的価値を持つかもしれないことについてです。耳のための詩「Rough And Roody Ways」もそうです。耳のための詩と、心への緊密なつながりのための詩。ディランは私たちを別の章を聞くように招き、別の部屋へと招き入れ、これまで行ったことのない場所の鍵を解き放ち、再び本当に特別なものを共有したいと望んでいます。聞くことはやりがいがあります。
「フェイクニュース」が真実の別語となり、オーウェル的な言葉が至る所にある時代に、ただただ疑問に思うしかありません。どの言葉がもはや感染せず、伝染性がなくなったのか、マスクなしで使用できる言葉は何か、ということです。どの言語ですか？自由の鐘は、ボブ・ディランの道で今もなおも波打ち寄せ、自らの言語の征服者であり創造者である彼は、他に類を見ない、時代の構成要素を使い続けています。シェイクスピアと『ダンカンとブレイディ』、サンスクリットとエアロビクス、エジプトの死者の書とブルースを混ぜ合わせ、全く新しいアルバムはパンくずが広がり、さらなる読書と聴取、何千年も前の思考、何世紀も前の歌や音楽へと、すべてに対する終わりなきトランスのような対話が続きます。その対話は、古いものであれ新しいものであれ、すべての独創的な思考を現代のものへと導くものです。新たな洞察と新鮮な知識の可能性学者や教授は、今後何年も『Rough And Rowdy Ways』という繊細な織り成す作業を続け、報酬は得られるでしょう。もちろん、新たな宝箱が観察できるでしょう。それでも、最初で最後に、今、アルバムを聴く必要があります。曲を聴く必要があります。声を聞く必要があります。ディランのサウンド、ジミーの後任が歌う「Rough And Rowdy Ways」のサウンドを聴く必要があります。
たとえ常にそれを主張すべき注意を払うべきであっても、このアルバムには非常に個人的な感覚を与える何かがあります。たとえ全人類に関することであっても、いくつかの曲では「I」の使用が特に威厳があり、さらに心温まる形で際立っています。曲のバリエーションやその気質にもかかわらず、まるで同じ石から全体として彫り出されたかのように感じられます。“Murder Most Foul”は卓越しており、すでに自らの人生を送ってきましたが、それでも全体の創作の雰囲気と色彩と結びついています。「Shadows In The Light」や「Fallen Angels」そして「Triplicate」の録音は、楽器やマイクロフォン、エンジニアリングの使用に関して、秘密の一部だと思います。ボブ・ディランは、多くの声の持ち役として復帰し、アルバム全体を通じて荒々しいブルースと騒がしいブルースから、優しい歌声までの距離を担当しています。彼は朗読と歌唱をシームレスに交互に行いますが、タイミングと表現に対する独自の本能を決してなくし、すべての言葉を重要にしています。彼が「I hope that the gods go eeeasy with me」と歌うのを聞いてみてください。そして、私の言いたいことが分かるかもしれません。どこかに感動的な裸があります。
ボブ・ディランはすでに無冠のインターテキスト性の王ですが、今回のアルバムほど顕著になることはないかもしれません。音楽、歴史、宗教（「I know all the Hindu rituals」）および文学に関する知識の海は、依然として自由かつ創造的に流れ続けており、インターテキスト性は彼自身の作品への示唆も含んでいます。意識的にも無意識的にも、あるいはトランス的でもあるかもしれません。彼自身が6月12日のニューヨーク・タイムズのインタビューで、アルバムのオープニングとウィットマン的な序章「I Contain Multitudes」について語った際に次のように語っています。「それは本能で書くようなものです」ややトランス状態です。私の最近の曲のほとんどはそのようなものです。歌詞は本物であり、具体的です。比喩ではありません。曲は自分自身を知っているようで、私がそれらを声とリズムで歌えることを知っています。彼らは自分で書くようにし、私に歌ってくれると期待しています。
すでに示されていないかのように、アルバムの残りの部分も同様にそれを行っており、多数が含まれています。次にリリースされるのは「False Prophet」の厳しいノープリズン・ダーティー・ブルースで、ディランは再び古くて有名なブルースリフを基にこの曲を構築し、前回は「Early Roman Kings」で行いました。たとえインタビューで彼が即興のビジネスに関わっていないと主張したとしても、まあ、好きなように呼んでください。曲はライブで年々、時には夜へと進化し、まるで『Early Roman Kings』のように、テンペストで最も興味深くない曲の一つだったかもしれませんが、ここ数年では驚異的なライブパフォーマンスへと成長します。ディランがステージからもう一度魔法を見せてくれることを願うばかりです。「False Prophet」はすでに致命的な曲です。このヴァースの受容について考えてみてください。
「My Own Version of You」は、ディランがフルフランケンシュタインのようにエネルギーと機知に溢れ、必要なものを探すために遺体安置所や修道院を訪れ、パチーノとブランドを素材として、レオン・ラッセルのようにピアノを演奏できる完璧な「あなた」を再現しようとするものです。この曲は速いワルツで、ブレヒト/ワイルのような風景の中にあり、劇的な緊張感と緊張感のあるテンポが演出されており、すべてが手遅れになる前にすぐに起こらなければなりません。ディランは歌うことと同じくらい熱心にラップしています。
私の個人的なお気に入りは、これまでのところ「I've Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You」です――それは心に直撃し、このアーティストのこれまで聞いた中でものとものののに物にぎないバラードです。柔らかく繊細なボーカル、バックグラウンドのバックシンガー、オッフェンバッハの『Barcarole』のメロディー、タイタニックが沈没した夜に流れた曲、そして人生を熟考する語り手の深く感動的な歌詞、そして「多くの人々が去った多くの人々」を記憶する哀愁に満ちたムードの中で、今、最後の信念の飛躍の一歩を準備しています。言葉に尽くせないほど美しいです！
最後の節では、その曲はアメリカン・ソングブックとフォークの伝統を結びつけています。「Some enchanted evening, I'll sing you a song/Black rider, black rider, you been on the job to long」、彼はロジャーズとハンマースタインの「Some Enchanted Evening」を示唆しており、この曲は「Shadows In The Night」で彼が訪れた曲であり、殺人バラード「Duncan And Brady」も手掛けています。作詞家は倉庫の視点で、上部のシェルブにまさにぴったり合うものを見つけています。すべてが一堂に会します。何でもです。それは作曲と呼ばれます！
“Mother of Muses”は“Ring Them Bells”を思い起こさせます。美しい旋律であり、インスピレーションの高次の力への祈りです。ミューズの母であるムネモシーネは、記憶と記憶の女神であり、年齢を重ねるにつれて以前よりも頻繁に近づく必要があるかもしれない、天王星と大地のガエアの娘であり、ゼウスと共に眠った後、九つの新しいミューズをもたらします。もちろん、ボブ・ディランはこの卓越した母のために歌を作ります。その歌は祈りとして始まります：「Mother of Muses s sing for me/Sing of the mountain and the deep dark sea」それから、彼は曲を書く際にさらにインスピレーションを受け、再びトランス状態に陥り、言及すべき別のテーマを思い出します。
語り手は、九人のうちの一人であるカリオペに恋をしており、叙事詩のミューズでありホメロスのミューズでもあります。今、彼は彼女の母親に懇願しています。「彼女は誰のものでもない、なぜ私に渡してくれないのですか？」依然として野心的で、執筆し続けたいです。もしかすると、祈りは「Murder Most Foul」の前に作られたのでしょうか？
ユリウス・カエサルは、内戦や独裁政権の台頭、ローマ帝国の崩壊以前に、ルビコン川を渡っていました。この表現は、永遠に「帰路のない地点」を過ぎ去ることの比喩として用いられています。「Crossing The Rubicon」という曲は川辺のシーザーから始まりますが、曲自体は「Three miles north of purgatory/One step From the great beyond」へとつながり、ジョン・リー・フッカーの幽霊と声の両方を露呈するブルースで、曲中の緊張が高まる様子に「Cry Awhile」の要素が加わっています。歌詞とボーカルの柔らかさとボーカルの変化、必要に応じて理想と暴力の両方を用います：「他者は寛容である」「他者は善である」「曲がったナイフで切り裂く/主よ、そしてあなたがいなくなると寂しくなります/私は立ちました」天と地の間/そして私はルビコンを横切ります。地獄のように厳しい歌です。
美しいスローバラード朗読「Key West (Philosopher Pirate)」は、複数の形で「Time Out of Mind」の終焉となり、ここでのナレーターは平地を1997年の別の画期的なアルバムで描かれた「Highlands」とは対照的に描写しています。楽曲はテーマ的に密接で、不死を探す場所であり、パラダイス・ディバイン――ハイランドで咲くツルサックルは「穏やかで美しい」、キーウェストのブーゲンビリアは「上質で公平」です。ハイランドの語り手が「太陽が私に降りかけ始めている/しかし、かつての太陽とは違います」と語るように、キーウェストのフラットランドの語り手は「肌に太陽の光を感じ、風の癒しの美徳を感じることができる」と語り、旅の終わりではなく「キーウェストは地平線の上にある」と語り、そしてすでに知っているように「地平線の向こう側では愛しやすい」と語っています。語り手は、扉が閉まる前にまだ天国へ入ろうとしており（もし扉があったとしても）、今回は近づいているかもしれません。シンプルなハドソネスク風のアコーディオンコードと柔らかなドラム、背面のハミング合唱、そして最高指揮者自身の威厳でありながら同時に繊細なボーカルは、アルバムの最初のクローザーで完璧に調和し、美しい場所が今後数年でゆっくりと沈んでいくかもしれないことを歌い、«Titanic»とそれほど変わらない比喩として歌っています。“Murder Most Foul” は第2章であり、ほぼ第2章と言える、次の段階へのガイドです。踊るのを忘れないでください。聞くことを忘れないでください。観察してください。聞いてください。聞いてください。聞いてください。彼はビル・モンローの『ホワイトハウス・ブルース』を引用して曲の開始さえします。
未来は過去のものです。独創的な考えというものは存在せず、私たちはただ過去に戻って、常に存在という偉大な問いをリサイクルしていること、そして私たちの前にある無限の経験と芸術の海が、自己認識とこの奇妙で美しい世界の理解という困難な山で新たな高みへと登る際に、依然として効率的な手段であることを認めなければなりません。その世界では「知恵は牢獄に投げ込まれる」のです。「Rough And Rowdy Ways」は、ボブ・ディランの芸術に見出される、あなたの魂の謎のロードマップに新たな一片を提供します。
“Take me to the river, release your charms
Let me lay down once in your sweet lovin’ arms
Wake me, shake me, free me from sin
Make me invisible like the wind
Got a mind to ramble, got a mind to roam
I’m travelin’ light, and I’m slow comin’ home”
(Mother of Muses, Bob Dylan)
It’s the difficult 39th album, and Bob Dylan is sharing his 2020 visions with us, one song at a time, just when we needed it most, considering the hard rain of curses and plagues, wanna-be-kings and all the pawns in their game coming our way, as we all have to admit that the waters around us has grown. Bob Dylan is in the middle of the stream. Still is, as a cool breeze encircles him, rollin’ slow, going where the wild roses grow, just checking in to see what condition the human condition is in. As dark as it is, there is still faith, hope and charity.
He is coming down from the mountain when he comes, but it’s quite a stretch to argue that he’s been far away since the release of “Tempest” in 2012 – three studio releases, seven Bootleg Series releases, two box sets of live recordings, five “50th Anniversary Edition” compilations, all in all more than 120 (!!!) discs worth of both new and old never before released recordings, alternate takes and outtakes, studio & live – combined with almost 600 shows, lots of rewritten songs, the “Rolling Thunder Revue” movie by Scorsese, the release of “Mondo Scripto”, a long string of exhibitions of paintings, portraits, car doors with gunshots (!!!), revisionist art and iron works, the surprising and revealing “Musicares Person of the Year” Speech, oh, and of course the boxed “The Complete Album Collection, Volume One”, containing multitudes already, on 47 discs, the interviews and the opening of the overwhelming Bob Dylan Archives in Tulsa. Throw in a Nobel Prize Speech & a Nobel Prize Lecture and the French Legion of Honor, and we are reminded that the last eight years haven’t been so quiet after all. This just to underscore the interesting strength of demand and expectation when Dylan releases “Rough And Rowdy Ways” Juneteenth 2020, the anticipation only heightened even more by the three teasers, “Murder Most Foul”, “I Contain Multitudes” & “False Prophet”, the first of the three Dylan’s first #1 song at the top of a Billboard chart, fifty-eight years after his debut as Columbia Recording Artist. He really is a slow-burning candle in the wind, that young Dylan – he never seem to fade away. That 19th of June is the day for celebrating the end to slavery might be coincidental, but is still a nice touch of fate. Dylan’s fight against racism has always been a part of his work, in an interview in 2012 he is naming racism as the “height of insanity” and a sickness that always has been holding the United States back. These days he is proven right. Prophet or not, here he comes.
“The future for me is already a thing of the past” – these are the words from “Bye And Bye” on “Love And Theft” (2001), the album where he also sings “I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past”. Even if the narrators might not be the same, time is in and out of mind, in songs written about twenty years ago, age don’t carry weight. Whatever it means, that the future is a thing of the past, the new phase of Dylan’s work from 2001, was a work of uncovering the tradition he loved, diving into it like Scrooge McDuck in his money bin, the difference though, where $crooge is greedy, Mr Dylan is endlessly generous in sharing his findings with his audience, both on albums and live on stage. From 2001 on he relives and revives tradition of pre-rock genres, even throwing in a Christmas album, bookending it with the great and mysterious “Tempest” (2012), always a gentleman thief of musical inspiration as well as poetical ideas and twists, as he mixes Shakespeare with Ovid and Homer, Henry Timrod and Edgar Allan Poe with Willie Dixon, Hambone Willie Newbern and Memphis Minnie with himself, making another round of his unique dylanesque stew of singing, of thoughts, of words and music, where the whole meal, the Jambalaya of connecting the dots and extending the lines, means endlessly much more than the diversity of ingredients. The past, not his past, was his future, he conquered it, once more with feeling, and at last facing one more mountain to climb, The Great American Songbook, breathing life and soul into standards that, in many cases, and for many, had turned into lifeless “muzak”, Dylan uncovering them, “some of the most heartbreaking songs put to record”, “lifting them out of the grave and into the light” with tasteful arrangements and exquisite phrasing, completing his journey through American music with a vocal style and tonal breath control that few would have thought possible a few years earlier. Still, he was fittingly, once more, annoying and upsetting a whole lot of critics and fans with this impeccable tour de force of Bob Dylan as Singer, a point he just had to make, and that he made. “People say I can’t sing!?” he says, tongue-in-cheek, in his Musicares Speech (2015), “I croak? Sound like a frog?….that my voice is shot? That I have no voice…?”, ensuring us that he has listened closely to the critics all the time, this day standing proud after the release of “Shadows In The Night”, living proof of his special and unique gifts as a singer and performer, himself the medium, bringing us the songs, meant to be heard, not read, as he pointed out in his Nobel Lecture two years later, then, of course, about his own songs, as literary valuable they might be. Poetry for your ears. So is “Rough And Rowdy Ways”. Poetry for your ears and for their tight connection to your heart. Dylan invites us to listen to another chapter, invites us into another room, unlocking the key to a place were we never been before, one more time wanting to share something really special. The listening is rewarding.
In times where “Fake news” is another word for the Truth, where orwellian speech is everywhere, one can only wonder, what words are not infected and contagious anymore, what words can be used without a mask? What language? The chimes of freedom are still flashing in Bob Dylan’s way with words, he, the conqueror and creator of his own language, second to none, still using building blocks from all times, mixing Shakespeare with “Duncan And Brady”, sanskrit with aerobics, the Egyptian book of the Dead with the blues, the whole new album bursting at the seams with breadcrumbs to further reading and listening, to thoughts from thousands of years ago, to songs and music centuries old, an endless trancelike conversation with it all, in a way that makes every original thought out there, old or new, a contemporary possibility to new insights and fresh knowledge. The scholars and professors will be kept working for years to come with the fine weave that makes “Rough And Rowdy Ways”, and it will be rewarding, of course it will, there is new treasure chests to observe. Still – first and last – just now we have to listen to the album, we have to listen to the songs, we have to listen to the Voice, to the sound of Dylan, to the sound of “Rough And Rowdy Ways”, as sung by Jimmie’s successor.
Even if one always should be careful to assert it, there is something about this album that makes it feel very personal. Even if it’s about the whole human race, the use of “I” is especially commanding in some of the songs, in an extra heartfelt way. Despite the variation in the songs and the temper of them, it feels like they were carved as a whole out of the same stone. “Murder Most Foul” is outstanding and has already lived a life for itself, still it’s connected to the mood and the color of the whole creation. The recordings of “Shadows In The Light”, “Fallen Angels” and the “Triplicate” is part of the secret, I think, when it comes to the use of instruments, microphones and engineering. Bob Dylan is back as the man of many voices, as he handles the distance from both the rough and rowdy blues and to the tender croon throughout the album. He alternates seamlessly between recitation and singing, but never without his distinct instinct for timing and phrasing, making every word count. Listen to him sing “I hope that the gods go eeeasy with me” and you might understand what I mean. There is a touching nakedness in there somewhere.
Bob Dylan is already the uncrowned King of Intertextuality, but maybe never more so than in this album, his oceans of knowledge of both music, history, religion (“I know all the Hindu rituals”) and literature, still flows freely and inventively, the intertextuality also including hints to his own work, maybe both conscious and unconscious, or trancelike, as he himself describes it in the New York Times interview, 12th of June, when he speaks about the album’s opener and whitmanesque prologue, “I Contain Multitudes”: “It’s one of those where you write it on instinct. Kind of in a trance state. Most of my recent songs are like that. The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors. The songs seem to know themselves and they know that I can sing them, vocally and rhythmically. They kind of write themselves and count on me to sing them.”
As if not already demonstrated, the rest of the album does it, too – it contains multitudes. Next out is the tough take-no-prisoners dirty blues of “False Prophet”, Dylan once again builds the song on an old and known bluesriff, as he last did it in “Early Roman Kings”. Even if he in the interview insists that he’s not involved in the business of improvising, well, call it what you want, the songs evolves live, from year to year, sometimes from night to night, as in the case of “Early Roman Kings”, growing from what might have been one of the least interesting tracks on “Tempest”, to a phenomenal live performance the last years. One would only hope that Dylan will show us the magic one more time from a stage, “False Prophet” already a killer track, just think about the reception of this verse:
“Well I’m the enemy of treason
Enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet
I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go“
Take that, Ratzinger! The Enemy of the Unlived Meaningless Life is speaking! That’s a label for you. Should be a sticker on the album!
“My Own Version of You” is Dylan going full Frankenstein, filled with energy and wit, “visiting morgues and monasteries” to find what he needs, trying to recreate a perfect “You” that might as well be himself, using Pacino and Brando as ingredients, and that can play piano as Leon Russell. The song is a fast waltz, in a kind of Brecht/Weill-landscape, a dramatic tension and a nervous pace, as it all has to happen soon, before it’s too late. Dylan is eagerly rapping as much as singing.
“Can you tell me what it means: To be or not to be?
You wont get away with foolin’ me
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessings of your smile
I’ll bring someone to life, it’s all about powers
Do it in the dark, in the wee, small hours“
My personal favorite, so far, just has to be “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” – it goes straight to my heart, a ballad as wistful as anything I’ve heard by this artist, the soft and tender vocal, the back-up-singers in the background, humming the tune of Offenbach’s Barcarole, a song played at Titanic the night it went down, the deeply touching lyrics of a narrator contemplating his life, in a melancholy mood remembering “Lot of people gone/lot of people I knew”, now ready for one last leap of faith. Beautiful beyond words!
“I´m sitting on my terrace lost in the stars
Listening to the sounds of the sad guitars
Been thinking it all over, and I thought it all through
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.”
As Dylan often has been referring to the Revelation when he need the strong pictures, as he maybe sings to the ceremonies of the third Horseman of the Apocalypse, “Black Rider”, known for his business in famine and justice, still, at times it’s like the “I” this time adresses the pale horse, Death itself, giving him a fight to the very end. It’s like a mystic folk song, found at the bottom of a lost and burnt-out library, the nice mandolin work adds an almost Eastern feeling to the song.
“Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, let it be now
Let me go through, open the door,
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don’t hug me, don’t flatter me, don’t turn on a charm
I’ll take a sword and hack of your arm“
In the last verse the song connects the American Songbook and the folk tradition: “Some enchanted evening, I’ll sing you a song/Black rider, black rider, you been on the job to long”, as he both hints at “Some Enchanted Evening” by Rodgers and Hammerstein, a song he visited on “Shadows In The Night” and the murder ballad “Duncan And Brady”. The songwriter is using his warehouse eyes, finding the exactly perfect fit in the shelve at the top. It all comes together. Anything goes. It’s called songwriting!
You can almost see Jimmy Reed smile and tap his foot from the beyond as Dylan is using all carburetors when he comes driving the full blown steel blue vehicle of the blues, as “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” bounces through the speakers, it just makes you wanna dance. The narrator is tired of the prodding of any kind, as he himself settles on an old receipt: “Give me that old time religion, it’s just what I need”. Not so hard to understand, as he elaborates on his thinking in the NYT interview, asked about why there hasn’t been more attention to the gospel music of Little Richard:
“Probably because gospel music is the music of good news and in these days there just isn’t any. Good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated likea hoodlum and put on the run. Castigated. All we see is good-for-nothing news. And we have to thank the media industry for that. It stirs people up. Gossip and dirty laundry. Dark news that depresses and horrifies you.”
Once more there is a proclaim of creed towards the songs and the singers, himself as much as anyone else. Every song of the album consists both richness and complexity, and you can never be entirely sure that you got it all, you have to listen just one more time, to the words, to the vocals. And then one more time.
“Mother of Muses” reminds me of “Ring Them Bells”, a beautiful melody and a prayer to the higher powers of inspiration. The mother of Muses herself, Mnemosyne, the goddess of remembrance and memory, the one that you with age might have to approach more often than before, daughter of Uranus and Gaea, of the Sky and the Earth, bringing nine new muses after sleeping with Zeus. Of course Bob Dylan makes a song for this remarkable mother of mothers, the song starting as a prayer: “Mother of Muses sing for me/Sing of the mountain and the deep dark sea.” Then he gets even more inspiration when writing the song, falling into trance once more, remembering another theme that ought to be mentioned.
“Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott
And of Zhukov and Patton and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they dared, and they went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day”
The narrator is falling in love with Calliope, one of the nine, the muse of epic poetry, the muse of Homer, now he’s begging her mother: “She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me?” Still ambitious, still want to write. Maybe the prayer was made before “Murder Most Foul”?
Julius Caesar was crossing the Rubicon river prior to the civil war, the rise to dictatorship and of the Roman Empire, the expression forever used as a metaphor for passing the point of no return. The song “Crossing The Rubicon” starts with Caesar by the river, but the song itself winds “Three miles north of purgatory/One step from the great beyond” in a blues that exposes both the ghost and the sound of John Lee Hooker, with a little touch of “Cry Awhile” in the way the tension in the song builds, the changes between the softer and the harder parts of the lyrics and the vocals, using both ideals and violence if needed: “Others can be tolerant/Others can be good/I cut you up with a crooked knife/Lord, and I’ll miss you when you’re gone/I stood between heaven and earth/And I cross the Rubicon.” A song tough as hell.
The beautiful slow ballad recitation “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” in more than one way makes the bookend to “Time Out of Mind”, the narrator here describing the flatlands as opposed to the “Highlands” described on another milestone album, from 1997, the songs thematically close, the place to look for immortality, for Paradise Divine – the honeysuckle blooming in the Highlands, “gentle and fair”, the bouganvillea in Key West, “fine and fair”. As the narrator in Highlands tells us that “The sun is beginning to shine on me/But it’s not like the sun that used to be”, the narrator in the Flatlands of Key West describes that you can “Feel the sunlight on your skin and the healing virtues of the wind”, still not the journey’s end, but “Key West is on the horizon line”, and, as we already know, “Beyond the horizon it is easy to love”. The narrator is still trying to get to heaven before they close the door, (if there ever was a door), and it might be that he is getting closer this time. The simple hudsonesque accordion chords and the gentle drums, the humming choir in the back, the commanding and at the same time tender vocals of the phraser-in-chief himself, it all comes perfect together in the album’s first closer, singing about a beautiful place that might slowly sink in years to come, as a metaphor not so different from «Titanic». “Murder Most Foul” is the second, almost as a second chapter in itself, a guide to the next phase. Don’t forget to dance. Don’t forget to listen. Stay observant. Listen. Listen. Listen. He even starts the song quoting Bill Monroe’s White House Blues.
The future is a thing of the past. There is no such thing as an original thought, we just have to go back and admit that we always are recycling the great questions of existence, and that the limitless ocean of experience and art before us, still is an efficient tool to use when we are climbing new heights in the difficult mountain of both self-knowledge and understanding of this strange and beautiful world, where “wisdom is thrown into jail”. “Rough And Rowdy Ways” makes a new piece of the puzzled road map of your soul as you can find it in the art of Bob Dylan.
It took rocks and gravel to make a solid road, and it took some hard travelin’, too, now it sure has been some rough and rowdy ways from the debut in 1962 till now. It sure has been one helluva ride. Then again, when Bob Dylan considers a new album, the bar is already placed almost impossibly high, knowing he’ll be judged against the highest standard of them all, his own work. That he still is expanding the possibilities of what a song can be, still makes songs and albums that couldn’t be made any other time than today, any other than him, is as impressive as ever. The years between “Tempest” and today has been absolutely necessary building blocks to be able to bring it all the way home, one more time.
“Rough And Rowdy Ways” is a new milestone, his best in the 2020’s.
«Rough And Rowdy Ways» is as rich as Aladdin’s Cave and as deep as the Pacific Ocean. You only see the top of the iceberg. If you think you got it, you have to listen more.
I remember thinking that “Tempest” would make a great swan-song. This is even more true of the testament we get in “Rough And Rowdy Ways”.
Still, I don’t think it will be. Surely, the best is yet to come.
Johnny Borgan
p.s. The cover is the perfect for a ‘song and dance man’. d.s.
