Rolling Stone
"Desire" is a
very special album, although Bob Dylan's adamant
approach keeps it from greatness. Somehow, though,
Dylan's antimusic winds up being very seductive. The
real problems with this record lie in other areas.
What's most striking about the record is that it such
a collaborative effort. Dylan works as closely with
these musicians and singers -- among them, violinist
Scarlet Rivera, bassist Rob Stoner and drummer, Howard
Wyeth of the Rolling Thunder Crew, and vocalists Emmylou
Harris and Ronee Blakley -- as he has with anyone since
the Band. But it's still Dylan's album. Had the group
been given a chance to record with more care, the record
could have been the blockbuster the songs deserve.
In addition to working with a band again, Dylan is
collaborating on lyrics with Jacques Levy (who co-wrote
"Chestnut Mare," among others, with Roger McGuinn), and
Dylan's longtime Columbia Records associate, Don DeVito,
has stepped into a full-fledged production role
(although he is given only a halfhearted credit).
DeVito's role is crucial. Although he wasn't able to
get Dylan to work with the musical discipline that's
been missing from all of his records since he left the
Nashville studio pros, DeVito did get a sound that's a
considerable improvement on the fuzzy "Blood on the
Tracks" or the seemingly unmixed "Planet Waves." Fuller
instrumentation might even have overwhelmed the
technical flaws. As it is, the drum sound adds a power
akin to rock & roll on almost every song, and the
droning effect of the voices set against Rivera's
violins is so seductive that it can make you forget that
what's being played is often fairly boring.
It's not altogether clear just what Jacques Levy
contributed to the songs. In many ways they are a piece
with Dylan's other work. But the humor that has been
missing since "John Wesley Harding " is in great
abundance here ("Isis" might be an outtake from "JWH")
and the imagery is the most strikingly well-developed
since "New Morning." On the other hand, the rhyme
schemes are just as tortured as ever: Mozambique may
very well rhyme with cheek-to-cheek, speak and peek, but
than there's "put his ass in stir" and "triple murder"
in "Hurricane."
But it's hardest to determine who is responsible for
the most meaningful change in Dylan's writing, which is
expressed in the songs concerning women. Previously,
Dylan has recognized only two kinds of women: "angles,"
whose function was to save man (from the women
themselves as often as not), and "bitches," whose
function was to let him down, if not by overt attempts
to ruin and confuse, at least by their failure to save.
The bitches enjoyed their hey-day during the "Just like
a Woman" period, of course, and their prominent return
on "Blood on the Tracks" was one of the principle
reasons why that album was believed to be a return to
the golden age. The angels dominated from "Nashville
Skyline" to "Planet Waves," and Dylan still holds onto
something of that vision: "Sara," one of two songs on
Desire which he wrote alone, again speaks of his wife as
a "sweet Virgin angel."
Part of this lyrical attitude may simply be the
altogether healthy influence of Levy, but some of it
must have had to do with the presence of women while the
record was being made. It is a little difficult to
imagine Dylan coming in with one of his "Just like a
Woman" poses while women looked on.
Scarlet River, in particular, asserts her identify
strongly on this album -- she sometimes seems to be
forcing her way in but she's never far from the heart of
the matter. Emmylou Harris is equally ubiquitous but her
presence is less strongly felt, partly, I guess, because
backup singing is a sell-defined woman's role. The
change, however, really stands out in the lyrics
--~"Isis" is on one of the several levels a send up of
the whole bitch/angel routine, and "Oh, Sister" might be
a sort of apology, again among other things. If "Sara"
tells us that Dylan is in some sense unregenerate in his
attitudes, its most telling lines concert the couple's
children, who are collaborations of quite another sort.
But love songs aren't the focus of "Desire," which is
one of the things that differentiates it from Dylan's
other post-rock work. On the best songs, Dylan returns
to the fantastic images, weird characters and absurdist
landscapes of the Sixties. The metaphors work on so many
levels they're impossible to sift, and just when you
think you have on firmly defined, it slips off into
something else again. The crucial ideas are cinematic:
in fact, one song, "Romance in Durango," seems to be an
explicit parable about making "Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid" in 1973. There are the usual romances, the stories
of hard-luck kids from rough slums, a couple of other
westerns, even a bit of travelogue ("Mozambique"). Some
of the songs, like "One More Cup of Coffee" (which is
apparently based on a story Ramblin' Jack Elliott used
to tell), seem ancient, as though Dylan were once more
using the resources of traditional folk music for his
melodies and themes.
But the bulk of the songs are nightmares, visions of
a man on the run from something he can't define, or else
stories about the fear of having nowhere to turn (as in
"Oh Sister" and "One More Cup of Coffee"). As Dylan
races past the tomb of the Pharaoh in "Isis," hunting
the world's biggest necklace and singing so deadpan it's
hard to believe it, or through the "Aztec ruins" and
ancestral towns of central Mexico in "Romance in
Durango," history and time collide, shift, interweave.
In "Black Diamond Bay" this is carried to its extreme.
In a madhouse hotel where suicidal Greeks are mistaken
for Soviet diplomats, the terrified protagonist, running
again from something unnamed loses her identity -- she
can't even remember the face on her passport. Open a
door, and like a Rube Goldberg is hung, a volcano
explodes, the island falls into the sea. And the desk
clerk, meanwhile, simply sits and smiles: he's seen it
all before.
It's hardly even surprising that we wind up with
Dylan sitting in front of his TV set, sipping a beer
while the whole wild story repeats itself on the "CBS
Evening News" with Walter Cronkite.
The record only falters, in fact, when it attempts to
write or rewrite real history. I believe Dylan's
confession about "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" in
"Sara" but I don't trust it. "Hurricane" is a setup. The
whole thing is too improbable for real life, though
(like the Hearst kidnapping) it did happen. Dylan even
sings with a measure of disbelief and in the end, his
rage is rather impotent. Is the point really that.
"Now all the criminals in their coats and their
tiesAre free to drink martinis and watch the sun
riseWhile Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cellAn
innocent man in a living hell"
This is hardly a radical idea of what it means for an
outspoken black boxer to be jailed by devious means It
is in fact, a little sophomoric to consider coats, ties
and martinis the real enemy of a man like Hurricane
Carter.
This problem presents itself most explicitly and
awkwardly in "Joey," a hymn to Joey Gallo, the
self-educated Mafioso who quelled an Attica riot and
then, upon his release, precipitated, with his brothers,
the most vicious modern mob war. Dylan would obviously
like to write an outlaw ballad, making a sort of Billy
the Kid or Pretty Boy Floyd from a modern-day thug.
But there are outlaws who have been branded as
criminals and then there are thugs who share jail cells
and not much else. Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie & Clyde
and Billy the Kid were supposed to be outlaws, robbing
from the rich to give the poor. If history denies this
-- we are now told that Billy was a vicious psychopath
and Pretty Boy not much better -- the impulse for their
canonization at least makes a kind of sense.
But Dylan's rationale for lionizing Joey Gallo is
different. Joey was heroic because he spent his time in
prison "Readin' Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich," because he
came out of prison dressed like Jimmy Cagney. For this
sense of style, Dylan is willing to forgive him his
numbers and gambling rackets -- even style attempting to
deny that he ever was involved with such things. But his
neatest ellipsis is to avoid all mention of the public
execution of Joseph Colombo, which the evidence suggests
the Gallo mob ordered.
In which case it is hardly relevant that Joey Gallo
did not carry a personal weapons and much more
understandable that he himself was gunned down in front
of his family. Gallo was an outlaw, in fact, only in the
sense that he refused to live by the rules of the mob --
it's as hard to be sympathetic to him as it is to be
sympathetic to him as it is to be comfortable with
Robert De Niro's crazy Johnny in "Mean Streets." Is an
intellectual Mafioso really that much more heroic than
an unlettered hood? This is elitist sophistry of the
worst sort, contemptible even when it comes from an
outlaw radlib like Bob Dylan.
Specious as it is, "Joey" is musically seductive. Its
chorus is perhaps the most memorable on the album, and
there's a passion in the singing and playing that is
uplifting. This doesn't excuse the sophomoric idea that
animates the passion but it does provide some kind of
measure of Dylan's continued power as a songwriter and
myth monger. Liking "Desire" is hardly the point --
there are those of us who will always believe that Dylan
is copping out until he returns to the fiery rock &
roll that drove his middle Sixties work, just as there
are those who will never truly love his music again
until he writes an album full of "Hurricanes." The test
of Bob Dylan's talent is really that all of us continue
to listen and hope.
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