Rating My CD's: She's an Artist, She Don't Look Back

16. Bob Dylan -- Bringing It All Back Home

Somewhere along the way, this tiny, curly-haired white boy from Goditscold, Minnesota became the Voice of a Generation, when such a title meant something beyond achieving a certain level of music-industry investment. Well before the Beatles promised them endless youth or the Rolling Stones gave them a window on their darkness, Bod Dylan enshrined in the Baby Boomers their founding myth; that they were righteous, that the world was going to shift into their hands without effort, by the aligning of some cosmic alarm clock. Hunter Thompson called it "that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or on theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave . . . ."

And there more or less, lies the reason I cared not a whit about Bob Dylan for the longest time; that sense of inevitable irrelevance to anyone born after 1960. I missed that high and beautiful wave; and have since seen little in it high or beautful. Just because I can dig on Cream's thundering romanticism doesn't mean I'm buying into the notion that sex and drugs and raucous music were something my parent's generation invented. Rather, like Howdy Doody and Social Security checks, it was something provided for them, and they claimed it as theirs.



This is the game all "generations" play, define themselves against the older group, and when the time comes, claim history itself. My own generation, denoted by the variable, the unknown X, squeezed between the Boom and the Millenium, define ourselves not by our power but by our victimhood. We are the first ones people took pills not to have, the first ones culled by Roe vs. Wade. We came of age in the Great Despair, the time of deficits and junk bonds, and our instincts have always been bluntly survivalist. Or so you start soap-boxing, if you ever take this garbage about "generations" seriously.

In truth, Bob Dylan is bigger than the Sixties, bigger than his Generation. He's bigger than a lot of things, and his roots go back far longer, back to Woodie Guthrie and beyond to a plain, hard, beautiful music centered on a determination to tell the truth, whatever the results. Sometimes those results have been insulting people giving him a reward, sometimes they've been refusing to appear on Ed Sullivan, sometimes they've been country music and whatever was happening on Self-Portrait. Dylan's willingness to annoy his fans makes him far more interesting in my book than an endless series of form-perfect guitar-and-harmonica albums.

In 1965, when Dylan released Bringing it All Back Home, people who had built a "definition" of folk music and its Importance to Society called him traitor, teenybopper, and as Ewan MacNoll put it, "a youth of mediocre talent. Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel." His sin, of course, was "going electric" and this was the album he did it on. Which I suppose is why I like it.

But I come to it as a devotee of punk rock and electric blues, compared to that, Bringing it sounds gentle and positively folky. It's really a hybrid album, half acoustic, and it took me a double-handful of times to really pick the different styles apart. Sure, the two most famous tunes, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Mr. Tambourine Man" are miles apart, but what about the rest? Am I really supposed to pretend that nothing of folk inhabits "She Belongs to Me", or nothing of rock in "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"? Whence comes this definition?

Let us summon some of that determination of honesty and state that if a more reactionary trend ever existed in popular music than early-60's folk music, we know it not. Now, there's nothing wrong with being a musical reactionary. Picking up old discarded things and polishing them up shiny and bringing them to life again yields positive human pleasure. But what is the basis for saying that "folk" music must be acoustic? If a Fender Stratocaster makes all the difference between Bob Dylan the folkie and Bob Dylan the rocker, then I plan on submitting "Blitzkrieg Bop" as Blind Lemon Jefferson's great lost song. Just as soon as I slow the tempo and sing the lyrics with a nasal warble over a dry acoustic arrangement.

Lester Bangs once wrote of rock and jazz and blues that "it's all folk music, anyway." We can add Hip-Hop to that category as well. Folk are the people, and folk music is the music the people are making. This album demonstrated that fact for the world to see.

A final note: anyone shocked by Bob's "conversion" to Christianity in the 70's wasn't paying attention in 1965. "Gates of Eden" my personal favorite, paints as pure a picture of the lesson religion tries to to teach us as any I've heard. Whatever's going on in Heaven, we don't understand it here, and all the things that claw our attention will melt like dew when we see that reality.  Neither kings nor poets can smuggle that cosmic Truth out of the Gates of Eden. We can only await events.

An artist who can touch on that in the middle of declaring independence from the movement that has made him famous, he contains multitudes. Such a one does not need to look back.

Grade: LL