Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read Free Book Online Page A

first American dream.
     
     
    This fine album comes only a few months after Dylan’s mostly unsuccessful Self Portrait. Not only does New Morning rock with the
vitality that Self Portrait lacks, but Dylan’s decision to release a new record without the usual year’s wait is in itself an act of vitality. One of the functions of rock ’n’ roll is the disruption of cultural patterns, and, by extension, of rock ’n’ roll patterns. Dylan has, to some degree, broken the rule of reserve that seems to have been governing his career, and in doing so he has brought some life back to the rock ’n’ roll scene.
    In the last year or so, the rock ’n’ roll audience has become fragmented, as the music lost that public character that comes out of our common participation in the event on which the music of the ’60s was founded—the Beatles. One man’s meat may be another man’s poison, but we gave that line the lie back in 1965, when the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan revealed the making of a common imagination accessible to each of us. Now that Captain Beefheart fans sneer at the legions of Led Zeppelin, who sneer right back, Dylan is offering an album of humor and depth, and it may well be accepted as a gift by almost all of the audience, as something to be held in common and as something to be shared.
    As the lines and phrases of New Morning pass into our speech, we may find that Bob Dylan’s remarkable new songs not only speak to us, but give us the means by which we can, for a time, speak among ourselves.
     
    Bob Dylan, New Morning (Columbia, 1970).

WATCHING THE RIVER FLOW
    Creem
    October 1971
     
    Lately it’s been difficult to tell the commercials from the hits, and it’s not because the commercials are getting any better. The summer charts are ghastly and almost every slot in the top ten is filled
by some hokey Hollywood production number with a trick chorus line.
    But now Bob Dylan, the Who, and Creedence all have new singles: “Watching the River Flow,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and “Sweet Hitch-Hiker.”
    Dylan’s seems like the best.
    It’s getting the least airplay.
    I’m not sure why this is so—it may be simply because it doesn’t have that creepy Hollywood sound—but I have the feeling Dylan outsmarted himself on this one. “Watching the River Flow” is nothing fancy, good beat, good humor, good AM noise. But as with most of Dylan’s records, there’s more here than there seems to be—and the first impression turns out to be a joke on the listener.
    But that only works if the listener is forced to hear the record often enough to get beyond the first impression. In this case, the first impression is that Bob Dylan is setting up the usual private scene: “I’ll sit here and watch the river flow.” Well, that’s certainly a boring idea. It’s the implicit message of just about everything James Taylor has ever written, whole bands are being built around the basic sentiment, and people are eating it up when they can get it cheap—that is, implicitly—but maybe they don’t want it when they have to pay for it, in a confrontation with an explicit statement of withdrawal that can be so easily reversed into the mirror image of their own.
    Then there’s the probability that one of the reasons people listen to Dylan is that he usually seems to be ahead of the game in some way, and to hear his music and his songs is to get some idea of what’s going on and what’s going to happen, in music and in musical communication. And there are those hopes for a more obscure and tantalizing sort of intelligence that never seem to go away. But if Dylan is merely riding a trend, even if he started it, a good part of his charisma automatically cancels itself out.
    And then, in a completely general sort of context, there are the curious rumors about Dylan’s private life, which are, yes, a matter of his own business, and also public property—if you know about
them you can’t very well