Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus Read Free Book Online Page B

lobotomize yourself into forgetting them: support for the Jewish Defense League, trips to Israel, putting up office buildings with Dick Cavett. None of this stuff may be true, but it’s all in the air, and like those stories about a young Bob Dylan running away from home every month or so, it doesn’t much matter if they’re true or not. You don’t make a rational separation between True and False when you hear a record, you just hear it, and its sound combines with the grapevine into pop. And in this case that adds up to Dylan as this strange one-man model of how to make up for one’s wild and odious youth. Sort of missing the point, as Stu Cook of Creedence Clearwater put it, that we all get to be thirty someday, we’re going to be thirty, not the people who were thirty when people first began to worry about such things. Or, as someone put it to a friend of mine when he took over a fancy magazine: “ You are them.” Don’t we remember how we were all supposed to stop liking rock ’n’ roll when we turned eighteen?
    We don’t have to believe this stuff anymore; we have to learn how to act out its negation. We have to make being thirty in the seventies and eighties as different as being twenty in the sixties was from being twenty in the fifties. So I wonder about Bob Dylan, who seems to be working in the opposite direction. Can we trust this guy?
    The first impression one gets from “Watching the River Flow” doesn’t even raise this question, because that first impression is so bland. “I’ll just sit here and watch the river flow.” The music is really quite nice but it sounds like the cut that was left off the first Leon Russell album because it was too pat. The guitar playing is good but you can hear it coming, and when it comes it sounds just like you expected it would. As a musical composition the song is an extension of “One More Weekend,” which came out of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” Everything about the music is well done, all of it is familiar, and none of it is very exciting. It’s as deeply a part of a trend as anything could be. I can’t recall another Dylan record that had music with such a complete absence of his musical personality. Even on Self Portrait, maybe especially there,
one was part of a certain realm of Dylan music, inimitable and unrepeatable, and this is Russell music, and not even because he plays on the record. The lack of Dylan’s presence in the sound or the style of the band here is another element in the record’s blandness—one of the things that’s exciting about a Dylan record is that it’s a Dylan record! and there’s no Dylan in this music. I think that’s another reason why it isn’t getting played much, why people don’t seem to care whether they hear it or not.
    Contrasted to the good Leon Russell music, though, is another new Dylan voice—humorous, in its manner paternal, wise as hell, and very hip. Not only is Dylan contrasting his vocal sound to Russell’s sound, it’s a sound we haven’t heard before. You don’t hear it right away, not the DJs giving the record those first few tentative plays to see if anyone calls in in response and then dropping it when nobody does, and not the Dylan fans who wouldn’t dream of calling up a Top 40 station and talking to one of those platter-chattering squares they hire.
    The song itself has nervous words that are turned into a joke by the way Dylan sings them. People are fighting and breaking down right in the street and the singer is pacing back and forth trying to find some way to deal with it all. “Daylight’s sneakin’ through the window and I’m still in this all-night café” (and that’s songwriting—look at how much he gets into one line). He’s bored out of his mind by this river bank that for some reason holds him with its own obscure inertia.
    You thought I hadn’t noticed, huh? You thought while I was learning Hebrew I forgot how to speak English?
    People disagreein’ on just