Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read Free Book Online

simple enthusiasm of the number with such
firm determination that a whole conversation of emotions comes into play.
    One aspect of this album’s distinction is its masterful organization. The songs speak to each other, sometimes working partly as cues for or comments on numbers that precede or follow. The first cut, “If Not for You,” acts like the hook line of a single, breaking the ice with its gaiety. Dylan’s harmonica moves in, just this once, like Alfred Hitchcock in a walk-on, offering a bit of familiarity. The frolic of the song disarms the listener’s inevitably apprehensive stance (“Hmmmmm, what’s this one going to be?”) and creates a space of easy freedom for both Dylan and his fans.
    In this kind of mood, you can either tune in on all the neat comments Bob is making about his honorary degree in the second song, “Day of the Locusts,” or simply enjoy the fact that he’s singing his head off.
    The cut ends with an escape to the Black Hills of Dakota and the next opens up with the singer quietly celebrating the slow-passing time up in the mountains. This sort of correspondence, or the two casual references to catching fish, or the various place names that appear throughout the album (Utah, Las Vegas, Minnesota, Montana, California) give the album its own reality without forcing the songs into a logical pattern.
    When the album ends, with two religious inventions—the first a spoken paragraph of what sounds like a TV preacher’s sermon, the second a ghostly Calvinistic rumble—one finds that, again, the songs comment on each other, as the Oral Roberts corn of the last strains of “Three Angels” (“But does anyone hear the music they play? Does anyone even try?”) is undercut by the stern testament of “Father of Night.” After a bit, the two songs begin to fade into each other, each gains in interest, and the joke of “Three Angels” takes on a little of the force of “Father of Night.” New Morning, as an album, has a context from which each song grows but to which no song submits.
    This is an American album with a western impulse (“Movin’ west,” as we used to say), and “Sign on the Window” may lie at the heart of New Morning. “Sign on the Window” is the richest of the
twelve songs and perhaps the best recording Dylan has ever made. His versatile piano work lies beneath much of the album; here, he’s playing mostly by himself. The band and the girls move in briefly between verses, but it’s Dylan’s performance:
    Her and her boyfriend went to California
Her and her boyfriend done change their tune
My best friend said now didn’t I warn ya . . .
    “Sign on the Window” is the other side of “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” in a way, the tale of the man who didn’t get to make the trip. One can see the singer, drunk in a town somewhere east of the Mississippi, as his isolation deepens into exclusion. “Sure gonna be wet tonight on Main Street,” goes a line, and the power of Dylan’s singing and of his piano makes that feel like the best line he ever wrote. Gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, but you know, there’s nowhere else to be.
    Dylan plays out the emotion of the song on his piano. “Build me a cabin in Utah,” he sings as it ends. “Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout . . . That must be what it’s all about.” It’s certain that these last lines will be hailed as Bob Dylan’s new message to us all, but they’re hardly that. When a wife and a trout stream settle easily on the same plane, that’s not a way of life but the ease of a dream. A cabin in Utah is the sort of dream one needs when it’s gonna be wet tonight on Main Street, when fantasy is set against experience.
    Rather than “What it’s all about” or even what this one song is all about, it’s that old American urge, that old half-question: “There must be a place that’s open, yet...” How far west do you have to go to be free? It’s a very great song, a love song moving west on the