Bob Dylan Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t hear it, really, but you are aware of it in the subtlest way. There is the power and the real depth of the song itself, that erases our Tennessee truck-stop postcard image of moonshining and moves in with a vision of nature, an ideal of repose, and a sense of rebellion that goes back to the founding of the country. “We ain’t paid no whiskey tax since 1792,” Bob sings, and that goes all the way back—they passed the whiskey tax in 1791. It’s a song about revolt as a vocation, not revolution, merely refusal. Old men hiding out in mountain valleys, keeping their own peace. (The old moonshiners are sitting around a stove in Thunder Road, trying to come up with an answer to the mobsters that are muscling in on the valley they’ve held since the Revolution. “Blaf sprat muglmmph ruurrp ffft,” says one. The audience stirs, realizing they can’t understand his Appalachian dialect. “If you’d take that tobacco plug out of your mouth, Jed,” says another whiskey man, “maybe we could understand what you said.”)
    What matters is Bob’s singing. He’s been the most inventive singer of the last ten years, creating his language of stress, fitting five words into a line of ten and ten into a line of five, shoving the words around and opening up spaces for noise and silence that through assault or seduction or the gift of good timing made room
for expression and emotion. Every vocal was a surprise. You couldn’t predict what it would sound like. The song itself, the structure of the song, was barely a clue. The limits were there to be evaded. On “Copper Kettle” that all happens, and it is noticeable because this is the only time on Self Portrait that it happens.
    “Not all great poets—like Wallace Stevens—are great singers,” Dylan said a year ago. “But a great singer—like Billie Holiday—is always a great poet.” That sort of poetry—and it’s that sort of poetry that made Dylan seem like a poet—is all there on “Copper Kettle,” in the way Bob changes into the lines “. . . or ROTTEN wood...” fading into a quieted “they’ll get you—by the smoke...” The fact that the rest of the album lacks the grace of “Copper Kettle” isn’t a matter of the album being different or new. It’s a matter of the music having power, or not having it.

(14, 15, 16)
    “. . . very successful in terms of money. Dylan’s concerts in the past have been booked by his own firm, Ashes and Sand, rather than [this is from Rolling Stone, December 7, 1968] private promoters. Promoters are now talking about a ten-city tour with the possibility of adding more dates, according to Variety.
    “Greta Garbo may also come out of retirement to do a series of personal appearances. The Swedish film star who wanted only ‘to be alone’ after continued press invasions of her life is rumored to be considering a series of lavish stage shows, possibly with Dylan...”
    And we’d just sit there and stare.
     
    (14) “Gotta Travel On.” Dylan sings “Gotta Travel On.”
     
    (15) We take “Blue Moon” for a joke, a stylized apotheosis of corn, or further musical evidence of Dylan’s retreat from the pop scene. But back on Elvis’s first album, there is another version of “Blue Moon,” a deep and moving performance that opens up the possibilities of the song and reveals the failure of Dylan’s recording.
    Hoofbeats, vaguely aided by a string bass and guitar, form the background to a vocal that blows a cemetery wind across the lines
of the song. Elvis moves back and forth with a high phantom wail, singing the part that fiddler Doug Kershaw plays on Dylan’s version, Elvis finally answering himself with a dark murmur that fades into silence. “It’s a revelation,” said a friend. “I can’t believe it.”
    There is nothing banal about “Blue Moon.” In formal musical terms, Dylan’s performance is virtually a cover of Elvis’s recording, but while one man sings toward the song, the other sings from