The Rolling Stones are still selling out sports stadiums, Neil Young is embraced as the godfather of grunge and the Beatles have found a new generation of 14-year-old fans with their “Anthology” campaign.
But Bob Dylan, though traveling in the commercial backwaters of a rock culture he helped invent, takes a back seat to none of them as an artist. With little fanfare he is making some of the best music of his life–at age 56 and fresh off a heart ailment that nearly killed him last summer.
Dylan’s new album, “Time Out of Mind” (Columbia), arrives in stores Tuesday, the culmination of an eight-year run in which the singer has quietly reclaimed his former greatness. The question is, Has anyone noticed?
Judged purely by the inflated commercial standards of today’s most successful pop artists, Dylan has become practically invisible. Arguably his greatest album, “Highway 61 Revisited,” was released in 1965, yet only a few months ago passed the 1 million mark in sales, an average of about 30,000 copies a year. In contrast, Alanis Morissette was selling that many albums in a single week in 1996. Dylan’s last Top 40 hit was in 1979 (“Gotta Serve Somebody”), and when he last played the Chicago area, a few weeks ago at the New World Music Theatre, a sparse crowd filled perhaps half the pavilion — and a good many of those were there for the opening act, Ani DiFranco.
But after a series of misguided or indifferent albums in the ’80s, Dylan has regained his bearings. Nothing will restore the youthful flexibility to his voice or the cocksure panache of his glory years, but Dylan has discovered a new intimacy in his art: quieter music with disquieting themes, centering on mortality, loneliness and abandonment.
His newer music may have eluded consumers and radio programmers, but it has not gone unnoticed by young artists such as DiFranco, Sinead O’Connor and Beck, who acknowledge him not just as a bygone influence, but as an ongoing inspiration. When DiFranco performed one of his songs on the recent tour, she chose not one of his ’60s classics, but the relatively recent “Most of the Time,” and made a case for it as one of Dylan’s greatest songs.
“Most of the Time” appears on Dylan’s 1989 album, “Oh Mercy,” and it was on that disc that the singer began to investigate some of the musical and lyrical ideas that have made his recent music so rich. On one song, “Man in the Long Black Coat,” Dylan articulated his vision of a world thick with illusions: “People don’t live or die, people just float.” The ghostly atmosphere conjured by producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Peter Gabriel) suited the subject matter, as Dylan’s characters drifted through a world in which they were becoming less sure of everything. “Everything is broken,” Dylan muttered in one song.
A few years later, Dylan released two low-key acoustic albums, “Good as I Been to You” (1992) and “World Gone Wrong” (1993), that consisted entirely of traditional folk and blues songs from the broken world of a different era. Several of these songs Dylan had learned in his youth from the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” compiled by musicologist Harry Smith in 1952 from records released from 1926 to 1934.
Like Smith, Dylan offered these acoustic performances, these stories from another time and place, not as nostalgia, but as a way of revealing the present. Dylan’s performances are astonishing, from the clarity and precision of his acoustic-guitar playing to the sly inflections and bittersweet intonations he coaxes from his burlap baritone.
Like the coal-mining balladeers and shadowy blues men in the “Anthology,” Dylan sings about longing, loss and unspeakable horror in a flat, monotone twang. It’s a voice that also belongs to the narrators in the brutally unsentimental stories of Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Connor. It is a voice all too aware that the monstrosity of a “world gone wrong” does not require the embroidery of emotion, but merely a stark, accurate accounting, as if melodrama would somehow diminish the human suffering at the core of these tales.
“Oh Mercy” and the two acoustic albums are a prelude to the new “Time Out of Mind,” an album that pivots around a single line from the penultimate song, “Can’t Wait”: “That’s how it is when things disintegrate.”
As mortality bears down hard — “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there” — Dylan projects the unease of someone adrift in a world that he ceases to understand, and that ceases to understand him. Yet he finds a strange comfort in his surroundings. “You could say I’m on anything but a roll,” he sings, one of many instances of the album’s gallows humor. The music, anchored by Dylan contemporaries such as pianist Jim Dickinson and organist Augie Myers, hovers like an eerie David Lynch soundtrack and echoes the solo-free groove and grind of Dylan’s ’60s masterpieces. With Lanois’ painterly production giving the songs a three-dimensional depth, the arrangements frame Dylan’s voice as few recent recordings have.
Dylan does not push his voice beyond its limits, but rather sing-speaks barely above a hush, as though holding an imaginary conversation with a distant lover, perhaps even his long-departed audience. He sings about love gone cold, but until the epic closing song, “Highlands,” that loss never acquires a human face. In this 16-minute epic, the singer briefly recaptures the conversational, playful and erotically charged tone of his youth.
If the Dylan of “World Gone Wrong” echoed Flannery O’Connor, the Dylan of “Time Out of Mind” evokes playwright Samuel Beckett and his spare, unsentimental poetry of despair. He is confident of only one thing: “When you think you’ve lost everything, you find out you can lose a little more.”
It is not a comforting message, but for Dylan that was never the point. He illuminates rather than sugarcoats, subverts rather the reassures, insinuates rather than preaches. And in the quiet mastery of his ’90s work, he brings a new dimension to that legacy.
