Village Voice
13 August 1985
Big, goopy songs, something like later Elvis ballads with a cranked-up whine instead of that inflated but still grand Presley sweep . . . a few echoes of the basement tapes, “Tears of Rage” on the new “I’ll Remember You” . . . “Clean Cut Kid,” sort of a “protest song,” there’s a beat but it’s CLUNK NOT FUNK—
Do you care? If it wasn’t for prerelease reviews in Rolling Stone and Time (This is the one! This is the real comeback! Not like the last one! raves), it might not be necessary to write off the new Bob Dylan album at all. But here it is, Empire Burlesque, one more dead battery, so why not.
Listening to this record quickly dissolves into a search for signs of life; there’re just enough to keep you listening, if that’s your idea of a good time. Put your ear to the chest: yes, “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky” is too long (even the title’s too long, not to say redundant; didn’t he once have a way with words?), but not only does it get going, it keeps going. Hold a mirror up to the mouth—it clouds over, barely. The horns are pointless, the guitar endlessly noodling even more so, but Sly & Robbie, part of any comeback LP’s necessary contingent of hired names, find a groove and hold it. There’s a shadow of the doomy conviction that drove the 1974 live recording of “All Along the Watchtower,” that rescued the 1976 “Hurricane” from its terrible rhymes and made it stick like a knife quivering in a wall—just a shadow, but it’s something. In moments Dylan seems to forget he’s singing, and so, in those moments, he does sing.
The question is, do you want to listen to this stuff? Do the bits and pieces you might hear on the radio or MTV touch you, do they catch you up short, provoke a response? Does any of it demand as much from you as Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”? For all the hopeful critical line-toeing about Sly & Robbie ’n’ Ron Wood & Mick Taylor ’n’ mixmaster Arthur Baker—serious record-making after years of one-take foolishness, etc.—the voice is what does or doesn’t reach you; the voice is what counts. And except in moments it’s the same voice Dylan has been strangling on since 1978, since Street Legal.
Even on John Wesley Harding, ten years before that (think about it: in 1968 Dylan’s career was seven years on, a fraction of its present entity, and the legend was already in place, already the Gorgon to be faced down, refused, accepted, evaded)—even then, there were instants in which, as a singer, Dylan sounded sick: ill. On “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” say: his voice curled up in his throat, will and desire collapsed under leaden vowels. It was hard to know where the dead weight came from; the lilt of “Down Along the Cove,” the nimble turns of “As I Went Out This Morning,” made it easy to forget. But since Street Legal, that sick sound, that sound of pain, has been close to Dylan’s whole voice.
In the domain of cliché, pain suggests blues, but this is anything but a blues voice: a voice that drifts away from its owner, gazes back at its maker, speaks of such things as “my second mind.” The pain in Dylan’s voice communicates as irritation, at best as bitterness. A whine that most often presents itself as cracker-barrel wise, it’s the voice of a crank—a crank who wants you to believe he’s seen it all but really just wants to complain that he hasn’t liked what he’s seen. Or is it that those who’ve looked at him haven’t liked what they’ve seen, haven’t liked it enough, haven’t liked it in the precise, proper, mysteriously right way?
Empire Burlesque is no more and no less confused than Street Legal. Unlike Infidels or the Christianist albums, that record was a career move against confusion, and so is this. It doesn’t sound like mud straight off, as Street Legal did—the record has a bright, balanced sound—but mud is what it is. Save for the last track, “Dark Eyes,” Dylan alone with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, nothing connects to anything else. It’s pure entropy: when the night comes falling from the sky it just goes back.
After the 1983 Infidels, a decent hit, a five-LP retrospective including much unreleased material was shelved—the balance sheets showed Dylan wasn’t ready for the history books. The quickie Real Live was shoved onto the market instead. The banality of the title cued the reviews, which were awful when they appeared at all; the album was a stiff. It contained Dylan’s most exciting performances since the 1975 Blood on the Tracks, the only true comeback album he’s ever made. On the Real Live version of “Tangled Up in Blue,” Dylan went through the verses as if he knew both what they said and what they didn’t say, and so he changed words all over the place. He played with the song, laughed with it, brought it to life, no doubt inventing as he sang. He reminded me that in 1965, when he would stand alone on a stage and sing the then-unreleased “Desolation Row,” people would laugh out loud, and he would grin. His music wasn’t a burden his audience was expected to shoulder; it was an adventure its audience was free to join, and free to reject. It wasn’t about Bob Dylan; only fools wondered if this or that song was about Joan Baez.
I hold no special brief for Bob Dylan as folk singer; he was great, but he was a better rocker, one of the four or five most piercing rock ’n’ roll singers of all. In the mid-sixties, when he was chasing the Elvis legend, shouting onstage with his hands cupped around his mouth to make a megaphone against the roar of the Hawks behind him, there was more of Dock Boggs, Buell Kazee, and other deep hollow singers in his voice than there ever was before. After closing his shows with “Like a Rolling Stone,” he would sneak backstage, sit down at the piano with Johnny Cash, and find his way into an American folk language so old his voice defined culture. He was rooted in history and rooted in the present moment, but there are no roots in his music now. The solo “Dark Eyes” connects not because it calls up some spurious, readymade sense of folkie roots, but because it’s the only song on the album where Bob Dylan isn’t singing about some undefined, unknown, unknowable, paranoid “they” or “you”: “they” who turned the clean-cut kid into a killer, “you” who doesn’t love me in just the way I need to be loved. “Dark Eyes” connects because here, as a singer, as a voice, Dylan is talking to somebody. That it’s himself is no matter: he’s not talking to a fixed object, an enemy, as he is everywhere else. What takes place, as he falls out of his crank-prophet voice and drifts into a reverie, is a conversation. You can imagine yourself part of it.
The theme of Empire Burlesque, both in lyrics and in the voice that puts them across, is simply stated: hell is other people. The most characteristic lines are from “Trust Yourself”: “If you want somebody you can trust, trust yourself . . . You won’t be disappointed when vain people let you down.” This dead end is where Dylan has been heading for years now; Empire Burlesque is one spirited variation after another on Street Legal’s notoriously non-ironic “Can you cook and sew / Make flowers grow / Can you understand my pain?”
I don’t think it’s worth asking if this signifies anything whatsoever about the state of things in 19 and 85: the collapse of pop community, the fragmentation of the audience, Big Chill—you know the line. I think it’s merely personal, and I won’t speculate as to the source. What’s the way out for someone who once caught fifty states, four hundred years, and four seasons in his voice? I don’t know, but perhaps it’s something that begins with the voice, something that makes the voice fuller, and less full of itself. Not humility, not regret—maybe cortisone, maybe a lot more Dock Boggs.
Bob Dylan, Empire Burlesque (Columbia, 1985).