The Believer
March/April 2009
8/9) Eden, directed by Declan Recks (Samson Films). In this film about a miserable Irish couple’s tenth anniversary, Aidan Kelly’s Billy Farrell leaves his wife in a disco for a party, chasing a girl he thinks has eyes for him, though all she sees is an old man. He passes out drunk; in a room behind him, people start singing “House of the Rising Sun.” Farrell wakes up, automatically singing along, sees the girl, stumbles to his feet, and as he grabs her, forcing himself on her as she tries to push him away, the song continues, but now the voice you hear belongs to Sinéad O’Connor, an avenging angel who seems to be singing from inside Farrell’s heart, which she’s turned against him. The song has gone from its commonplace beginnings somewhere in the American south, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, to Bob Dylan’s first album in 1962 to the Animals’ epochal 1964 worldwide hit, to countless versions by street singers and karaoke belters to a party in an Irish town in the early 21st century, where if nothing else it’s a song everybody knows, and from there into the spectral hands of a woman who could stare down anyone on the planet—and who’s to say where its true home is, who owns it, whose singing most rings true?
The Believer
July 2009
1) Bob Dylan, Together Through Life (Columbia). Casual, to the point where the clumsiness comes to the surface—except with “Forgetful Heart,” where a shadow passes over the singer’s face. But nothing here quite carries the weight of a scene from last season’s In Treatment, when Mia Wasikowska’s smart, sarcastic, suicidal teenage gymnast Sophie turns the tables on Gabriel Bryne’s fifty-something psychologist Paul Weston, as if once she was so much older but she’s younger than that now and he’s too old to know what she’s talking about. “‘The times they are a-changing,’” she says as a session is ending. “It’s from a Bob Dylan song. My gift to you.”
10) Bob Dylan, video for “Beyond Here Lies Nothing” (YouTube). A montage of photos from Bruce Davidson’s 1959 series “Brooklyn Gang”—Larry Clark’s Tulsa made suitable for Vogue—with the Jokers getting tattoos, hanging around, taking their shirts off, going to Coney Island, trying to look as if they don’t care. Near the end a woman with lank black hair and black eye-makeup comes into the story. She carries experience the boys don’t, desires they couldn’t fathom, but she has nowhere else to go and so she’s here. She’s a dead ringer for Amy Winehouse, and you miss her more than ever.
The Believer
February 2010
6/7) Bob Dylan and Dion, United Palace Theater (New York, 17 November 2009). The stage of the Rev. Ike’s old stomping grounds was pure House of Blue lights before Dylan came on: deep velvet background, upside down electric candles ringing the top of the stage. In that stetting “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” from Together Through Life last spring, was a sultry vamp from a ’40s supper club. Clearly the song was still opening itself up to Dylan; he sang with heart, as if looking to find how much it might tell him. “Dedicated to our troops,” Dion had said earlier, for “Abraham, Martin and John,” and the mood Dylan was creating was already too fine for “Masters of War.” Instead he sang the mom-sends-son-off-to-glory-and-then-he-comes-back number “John Brown” (it sounds like an ancient British broadsheet; Dylan copyrighted it in 1963) in a hard-boiled voice, the Continental Op running down the murders in Red Harvest. Most striking of all was “Ballad of a Thin Man.” In Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There, Cate Blanchett, as Dylan in London in 1966, acts out the song standing alone behind a mike stand like a nightclub singer, no protection of a guitar between performer and audience. It was something Bob Dylan had never done, but that was precisely the posture he assumed now, as if the movie had taught him something new about his own song: how to make it more intimate, more direct, so that it was the audience, not the singer, that was left more naked, more defenseless.
For all that, Dion stole the show. He began with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”—and that had be to remind both Dylan and the crowd of the night in early 1959, just days before Holly died, when a seventeen-year-old Robert Zimmerman sat in the Duluth National Guard Armory, Holly himself sang “Rave On,” and Dion was an opening act on that show, too. Now he was seventy, and his voice grew, spread out, gained in suppleness and reach with every song. One by one, he put the oldies behind him, so that it all came to a head with “King of the New York Streets,” from 1989.
It’s a gorgeous, panoramic song: a strutting brag that in the end turns back on itself, a Bronx match for the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” It leads with huge, doomy chords, wide silences between the notes, creating a sense of wonder and suspension, and you don’t want the moment to break, for the music to take a single step forward—just as, after the song has gone on and on, you can’t bear the idea that it’s going to end. From that almost frozen beginning, the pace seemed to speed up with every verse, but it wasn’t the beat that was doubling; it was the intensity and the drama. Dion’s wails were as fierce as ever, but never so full of wide-open spaces, the voice itself an undiscovered country, and it was hard to believe that he had ever sung better.
The Believer
June 2010
2) Alfred: “Like a Rolling Stone,” in Bob Dylan Revisited: 13 Graphic Interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Songs (Norton). Almost everything here is destructively literal, to the point that most of the pictures meant to illustrate the songs are accompanied by matching lyrics that instead illustrate the pictures—or reveal the complete lack of imagination behind them. By contrast—and with the use of shifting color schemes, where each chapter in the story of a woman attempting to escape into a life of her own and continually finding herself imprisoned by the life she was born to is governed by shadings of blue, taupe, yellow, olive green, brown, gray, and finally a bright, light-filled page that is scarier than anything darker—Alfred trusts abstraction. Until the very last of his sixty-seven panels there isn’t a word to be seen. The story he tells isn’t obvious, isn’t clear. It doesn’t match Dylan’s soaring, heat-seeking-missile crescendos and choruses—it brings them down to earth. It isn’t a social allegory; it’s one person’s odyssey, a lifetime that returns her to precisely the place she first flees. And the Siamese cat isn’t a symbol of evil or anything else. It’s the woman’s conscience, or the one who, all along, has been singing the song that has been playing deep in the farthest back corners of her mind.
The Believer
September 2010
5&6) Matt Diehl interviews Joni Mitchell (Los Angeles Times, April 22). “Bob is not authentic at all,” Mitchell said. “He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.” Charles Taylor: “In protest, Chelsea Clinton changes her name to Hibbing.”