 "AND I KNOW NO ONE CAN SING THE BLUES LIKE BLIND WILLIE McTELL"
You speak to me
In sign language
As I'm eating a sandwich
In a small cafe
At a quarter to three
But I can't respond
To your sign language.
You're taking advantage,
Bringing me down.
Can't you make any sound?
- Sign Language Written by Bob Dylan. Recorded by Eric Clapton on No Reason to Cry
I don't write about it a whole lot here, but I used to write songs. Back in the 90s, I wrote a couple of albums worth (if you want an mp3 or two, drop me an email.) Granted, I truly sucked at it, but songwriting is something I know a little bit about.
If you're a songwriter, or just someone who appreciates the craft, you know that there's two catagories of writers: Bob Dylan and everybody else. If there's been anyone as great as Dylan for as long, I certainly can't think of him or her. His first album came out in 1961, and his most recent album - containing the majestic Mississippi, Love and Theft came out in 2001. That's 39 years of great songwriting, an unheard of feat in pop music. And the things that Dylan leaves off of albums is often even better than what he puts on. During the sessions for 1983's Infidels, he recorded a song called Blind Willie McTell, which is not only one of his very finest songs, but one of the greatest songs ever written. Blind Willie McTell is great at the level of My Funny Valentine by Rogers and Hart, a perfectly contructed song. And when Infidels was released, Blind Willie McTell wasn't on it. As you can imagine, Bob's a peculiar guy. In an age where the public is shocked if a modern artist has three merely good songs on an album, its hard to rememer and truly appreciate that Dylan released five of the greatest albums of all time, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Hardng. Futhermore, he did them one right after another, all in five years. Even after that unbelievble streak in the Sixties, Dylan continued to release back to back classics, like Blood on the Tracks and Desire in the Seventies and, most recently, Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. Even when you factor in some of the truly horrible albums he's made, and Dylan himself will tell you that he's made several, his is one of the truly stellar bodies of work in music history. Some will make derisive comments about Dylan's voice or performance style as a way to minimize his greatness. Such people are, as we all know, idiots. Focusing on anything other than his songwriting is like pointing out that Jesus wasn't that great a carpenter - it sort of misses the point. If you don't love, respect and admire Bob Dylan, you were born wrong and you're not someone I want to know. It should then stand to reason that if you want a considered opinion on popular music, you could do worse than getting Bob Dylan's. And Bob's just not having it. Any of it. Even, apparently, his own.
"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
Dylan, who released eight studio albums in that time, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday.
Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."
"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static."  I'm not sure that I'd go as far as Dylan, but music really has sucked hard as of late. The last new band I was really, truly excited about was Nirvana. Just as Nirvana obliterated the popular music scene that came before it with Nevermind, Kurt Cobain seemingly murdered modern music with his suicide 12 years ago. Other than Hole's Live Through This, about half of Celebrity Skin and maybe a few moments of brilliance from Radiohead, there's been pretty much nothing. Only the old-timers like Dylan, Johnny Cash, Steve Earle and Warren Zevon (Peace be upon Him) have released anything of any quality.
Even rap, which showed such revolutionary promise once upon a time is mostly commercial formulatic pablum and has been since Ice Cube's Death Certificate Eminem's first two albums had flashes of genius in them, but he's long since become a latter-day Elvis, given more to seclusion, sleeping pills and sub-standard work than exploring the artistic promise he once had. If 50 Cent is really the best the genre has to offer, then the format should have been buried a long time ago. Even the once-great Beastie Boys are more concerned with with freeing Tibet than making a great record.
Dylan doesn't even spare himself. Unlike most musicians with new product coming out, Bob's not running around declaring that it is the greatest thing committed to tape.
Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.
"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."
Hearing Bob knock the production of his own albums isn't new. He's been doing that since the mid-Seventies. Dylan spends most of his life on the road and records albums in just four or five weeks with whatever musicians he happens to have around at the time. Half of Blood on the Tracks was recorded with a band that his brother threw together in Minneapolis at the last minute. And that record still sounds better than 99% of everything that's come since.
When I was a kid, I was introduced to music by a group of significantly older friends. Consequently, the music I was introduced to was older than I was. These people were absolutely elitist about what was acceptable, too. If someting was recorded after 1971, it was by definition horrible. I wasn't that way. I listened to lots of modern pop, as well. It wasn't at all unusual for me to see, say, Bon Jovi and Ray Charles in the same month. Or some local jazz singer in a club the night after seeing Motley Crue at Maple Leaf Gardens.
I swore when I was 10 years old that I would never have that elitist attitude - or become what I referred to as "that guy." Unfortunately, the music industry forced it on me. Pretty much everything created since 1994 barely qualifies as music. And Bob Dylan should know since he pretty much invented music.
The closet era to the one we're in now is 1959-62. Elvis was drafted, Chuck Berry was in the clink, Jerry Lee Lewis was poking his 13-year-old cousin and Buddy Holly was dead. That didn't kill rock n' roll, but the record companies tried their damndest. They went about signing every third-rate imitation they could find. But they found the safest, most inoffensive imitations they could find. Danger had completely escaped music. Sure, you had the haunting Roy Orbison, the odd Del Shannon record and Frank Sinatra was cutting his early Reprise sides, but that was it.
It was a sad time. And that, my friends, is precisely where we are now. In fact, it's worse.
Back then, there were hundreds of record companies, large and small. Now there are barely three. Capitalism used to be a wonderful thing for the music industry because the competition of multiple labels forced them to take chances. That's how people like Bob Dylan got a chance. If you listen to even the earliest Beatles singles, you'll note that they sound different from everything that came before, tinged as they are with the British music hall tradition Paul McCartney grew up with. I defy any of you to coherently explain where Jimi Hendrix's sound came from.
All of them would never get within 300 feet of a label executives office today because they sound so different from the mainstream. And forget about truly brilliant songwriters like Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits or Warren Zevon. In today's climate, you never get to hear them, or anything else that's even remotely interesting because they sound nothing like the fourth-generation Britney Spears or Limp Bizcut clones the labels insist you buy. Because record labels are no longer run by people who truly love music, music has become another commodity - like shoes, but less enjoyable and with a considerably shorter shelf life. Because there's no real competition, there's no incentive to take a chance that could bite the bottom line right on the ass.
I've often thought that there'd be another Beatles or Nirvana on the horizon, but I'm smart so I gave up hope on that years ago. The business isn't structured to sign what's good, it's structured to exploit trends. That's what they do. Also, the finacial pressure from peer-to-peer downloading services means that they'll be even even less likely to give anyone who could lose them money a chance. That would be bad business and the music business has been run by suits rather than fans for far too long.
If you're waiting for another Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Waylon Jennings, Tom Waits, Prince, The Smiths, or the Pixies, I hope you brought a lunch. There is no James Brown on the horizon. Bob Dylan represents the very finest tradition of American music, but Bob Dylan is 65 years old. He and the generations of recording artists he inspired aren't going to be around forever. Mine might be the last generation that remembers music as being something other than cookie-cutter, manufactured garbage.
But if you love quality music, this isn't entirely bad. There are thousands of quality songwriters from the past who never got their due. Some, like Townes Van Zandt, are gone, but they left great catalogues for you to discover. I'm seeing Randy Newman in concert for the first time on October 15.
The Sex Pistols were more right than they knew when they sand about "no future," but there is a rich past out there if you're willing to look hard enough for it.
And with peer-to-peer technology, that's something the record companies can never take away from us.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Blind Willie McTell By: Bob Dylan From: The Bootleg Series: Volumes 1-3
PermalinkLabels: I Hate Music
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