New York Times
15 November 1970
Bob Dylan’s New Morning is his best album in years, a set of twelve new songs that hide their real power to move the listener within the bright pop flash of entertainment.
Many of the songs seem to have been made up on the spot, with confidence in the ability of first-rate musicians to move in any direction at any time. “I know you’re gonna think this song is just a riff,” Bob sang five years ago, being careful to add, “unless you’ve been inside a tunnel and fell down sixty-nine, seventy feet over a barbed wire fence.” The riffs, inventions, and studio jams of New Morning have their own personality—not the repose of Nashville Skyline or the seeming indifference of much of Self Portrait, but the full joy of anticipating the right move and the exhilaration of hitting it square and bouncing off a chord into a new lyric.
The more carefully worked out songs—“Went to See the Gypsy” and “Sign in the Window” in particular—are deceptive, because they, too, maintain the listener’s sense of the album as a work of effortless music. These songs appear obvious, and while they are not, one is still quite free to hear them as if they were.
New Morning is fun to listen to. Dylan has never sung with such flair. The record has its own sound, a rich, open rock ’n’ roll combination of Dylan’s piano, Al Kooper’s organ, girl singers, two or three snappy guitars, and some fine hotshot drumming.
The musicians as a group are at their best on the title song, playing hard rock. The surprising toughness of the cut—which in other hands might have been (and probably will be) just another bland hymn to optimism—results not from dump-truck heaviness but from perfect timing, a jolt of pure excitement near the end of the number, and from Bob’s singing. As the lyrics give us a pretty picture, Dylan sings out the last word or two with a hard-edged vengeance, not submitting to the obvious way to sing the song, but intensifying the 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 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).