‘Nobody Sings Dylan
Like Dylan’
(Columbia advertising tagline to promote
Dylan’s own records)
Many years ago, Bob Dylan was asked by an interviewer what
motivated him to write songs. Dylan might have said, for instance, that he was
inspired to reflect the times he lived in; or indeed, that he hoped to try to
help change those times by protesting via song; or simply that it was his
chosen way of earning a living. What he actually replied, however, was that he
became a songwriter because he needed
the songs to sing himself…
Now, it may be that Dylan realised early on that that his
own voice was not likely to provide him with a conventional career in singing -
although it’s fun to imagine that in some alternative reality there is another
Dylan who became the Elvis Presley of his time. We should recall, at this
point, that Dylan himself has never actually seemed to have experienced many
doubts about his voice. He fronted his first band at high school, a rock ‘n’
roll outfit, after all. In the mid-60s documentary film, Don’t Look Back, when Dylan bragged to an interviewer that he was
‘just as good a singer as Caruso [superstar operatic tenor of the early C20th]’
who could ‘hit all those notes’ and not only that, but with the option of
holding his breath ‘three times as long’, you got the impression that his
tongue was only partly in his cheek. And in the late 1970s, he took to the
stage sporting a glitzy white jumpsuit a’la the recently deceased Presley,
occasionally performing sans guitar or harmonica, with a hand-held mike.
Dylan, of course, first became known in the field of Folk
music, a genre defined and, at that time, somewhat confined by its tradition.
Folk singers were not particularly noted for the sweetness of their tone or the
technical stretch of their voices. Dylan fitted in well for a while,
contributing original masterpieces to the old archives and becoming the first
Folk superstar, before breaking free of its limitations to help invent the new
phenomenon of Rock Music (in his wake, the sub-genre of Folk Rock developed,
although he never really took part in that, by then being driven more in the
direction of electric Blues and Country music).
By 1965, Dylan more than ever needed to write the songs that
he himself wanted to sing because no-one else had ever written such songs
before, let alone played them like he and his new backing musicians did, or sang
them as he did. His voice, always an exceptionally expressive instrument, if
not a mellifluous one, had grown in authority with each of his records. It was
as if the strength of his voice was following the upward curve of his
commercial success and cultural influence.
The apex of this arc was reached during the brief period of
January 1965 through March ’66 when the albums
Bringin’ It All Back Home, Highway
61Revisited and
Blonde On Blonde were
all released – quite possibly the most remarkable purple patch in the history
of popular music. The performances from this time are wildly original,
sometimes almost to the point of abstraction – take for instance the rendition
of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ from the acoustic half of the
Manchester concert (‘The Bootleg Series Vol.
4 –
Live 1966). The way Dylan
accentuates the last words of lines is absurd, and yet taken with his
other-worldly harmonica playing, the effect is weirdly compelling.
Dylan’s legendary motor-cycle accident brought his
tumultuous world tour to an end by midsummer ’66. His singing would never again
aspire to such heights as those he reached during this period.
Back To The Starting
Point!
(Planet Waves (1974) sleevenote)
Following the austere, biblically inspired comeback album, John Wesley Harding (1967), Dylan
achieved with ‘Lay Lady Lay’ what is still his biggest crossover hit – in the
sense that it was bought by many people who may never have bought his records
before or since. The single came from the sessions that produced Nashville Skyline (1969), Self Portrait (1970) and the bootlegged duets with Johnny Cash.
These recordings featured a dramatically different Dylan voice with a rich,
honeyed Country tone attributed to a spell away from smoking. A voice which,
had he retained and maintained it, may have led to bigger sales across a
broader spectrum of the record-buying public.
For whatever reason – panic at the critical mauling dished
out to Self Portrait; succumbing back
into smoking; or sheer and typical contrariness – Dylan rapidly found his
old voice again and it would stand him in good stead throughout the 1970s and
beyond. The vocal reach was reducing though: whilst his middle range remained
strong, the gentle balladic croon and the glorious, soaring holler either side
of it were fading slightly. By the late 1980s, even though he left the decade
with one of his strongest albums (the eloquent, luminescent Oh Mercy (1989), the rot had set in.
Always an acquired taste, Dylan’s singing subsequently
became a real challenge to listeners whose ears were becoming more attuned to
the increasingly homogenised sounds coming out of Top 40 radio stations and MTV.
Dylan, however, still had to write the songs he needed to sing and, as The
Never-Ending Tour ground on through the 1990s into the 21st century,
he would trickle new material into his jukebox set-lists, also occasionally
attempting cover-versions that were well beyond the frequently one-dimensional
growling of his live performances.
The paradox is that since the appearance of the
career-rescuing Time Out Of Mind (1997),
produced - like the similarly revivifying Oh
Mercy – by ambient swampster, Daniel Lanois, Dylan’s critical reputation
and album-chart positions have flourished as his voice has declined. His most
recent albums, self-produced under the pseudonym ‘Jack Frost’, find him
settling into comfortable old Blues and Folk grooves, rhyming his way, often
quite aimlessly, through vague, overlong narratives about the battle of the
sexes. Familiar territory indeed, and with recycled riffs and tunes, not to
mention uncredited lyrical borrowings in verses that might have been shuffled
around in sequence without losing – or gaining – much of their sense.
Depending on where you stand on Dylan, he’s either doing a
grand job of keeping the Folk and Blues tradition alive, or merely treading
water in the twilight of his career. Critics, however, appear to love this
later material, and there seems to be evidence of the records picking up new
fans along the way. Maybe this younger audience are seduced by the
weather-beaten monument of Dylan’s voice in a similar way to how he and so many
of his own generation were drawn to the gravelly, grizzled old Blues and Folk
troubadours of the pre-Rock period. Didn’t Dylan say, way back when, that he
hoped to ‘carry [himself] the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly
and Lightnin’ Hopkins
have carried themselves.’?
And who’s to say that, half a century into his recording
career, along with all his other achievements, that he hasn’t attained that
end? (Of course, he also said way back when, that he wasn’t interested in
‘making a million dollars’, a sum of money far beyond the reach of Big Joe
& Co., but merely the tip of the iceberg of riches that he’s assiduously amassed
during his long and lucrative career, writing songs, touring and producing
those dubious ‘artworks’ sold for ridiculous amounts of money in upmarket
galleries).
‘It was Rock-A-Day
Johnny singin’
“Ooh wah, tell your
Ma, tell your Pa,
our love’s a-gonna
grow, ooh-wah, ooh-wah.”’
(‘Talkin’ World War
III Blues’ (1963)
Apart from the rapacious rise of Rap (a
style which appeared in the early 1980s and which Dylan is often credited with
foreshadowing via ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ a decade and a half before),
the most significant developments during the past thirty years in terms of
chart success are a) the gender shift towards female singers in the US, b) the
proliferation of so-called Boy Bands and Girl Bands in the UK and c) the
influence of globally franchised of TV talent shows for singers. This has led
to a protracted artistic wilderness similar – but much longer – than the
sterile hiatus that blighted pop music between 1959-62, the period between the
withering of Rock ‘N’ Roll and the blooming of The Beatles and Dylan himself.
The first of these phenomena, though generally to be
welcomed as evidence of growing equality between the sexes in the music
industry, has hardly resulted in the pushing of any musical boundaries. The
likes of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Beyonce are undoubtedly more than
merely competent singers, though none of them has produced what could be
described as art. Madonna is more
interesting, but like the others, is celebrated more for her commercial
superstardom than her artistic achievement.
The British Boy & Girl Bands (e.g. Take That, Boyzone,
Westlife, The Spice Girls, The Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Steps, S Club 7 etc.)
are not even real ‘bands’, of course – they are merely groups of anodyne
singers with telegenic faces. Managed by people with no intrinsic interest in
music beyond its capital potential and auto-tuned in the studio by producers
who work up songs with composers who write on Pro-Tools technology, these
groups churn out hit after hit of the same moronic, balladic slush year after
year. Anyone seeking proof of the contention that sustained chart success does
not necessarily bear any relation to notions of artistry, need look no further
than the extraordinary career of Westlife, who provide living embodiment of the
old maxim that ‘shit sells’. If ever there was an example of Orwellian
‘prolefeed’ in the UK
today than this is it. Call it Pap Music.
Bob Dylan’s latter-day abrasive croak is the antithesis of
the sort of pop music described above. Indeed, his singing has long provided an
easy target for parody: in a recent episode of the long-running Radio 4 spoof
game-show,
I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue,
the comedian Jeremy Hardy, competing in a round called ‘One Song In The Style
Of Another’, was called upon to sing the nursery rhyme, ‘The Wheels On The Bus
Go Round And Round’ in the style of Dylan. Hardy carried it off to hilarious
effect, but it’s probably true to say that most of these piss-takes tend to be
affectionately done.
Dylan’s contemporary growl exists – and indeed, prospers –
in an alternative artistic reality that he himself helped to create in the
mid-1960s. Though critical of much of his work over the last twenty years, I
continue to applaud and value it, albeit with reservations. But what of those
relentless money-spinners like The X
Factor and Pop Idol that dominate TV, radio, charts and
tabloids the world over? How do we regard Dylan as a singer in this kind of
context?
During the spring of 2012, BBCTV aired a new talent show designed
to satisfy the tastes of the reality TV and karaoke generations. The Voice
UK, offered an intriguing new
gimmick: in its early rounds, the judges would conduct ‘blind auditions’,
selecting hopefuls for their teams purely on the basis of hearing them sing. The four judges, sat on swivel chairs in the TV
studio, punched a button to indicate their choice, and only then swing round to
actually see the singer, who would,
in turn, decide which of the judges’ teams they wished to join.
The judges, by the way, were comprised of venerable Welsh
tenor and titilator, Tom Jones, a fine singer by any standard; Jesse J, a
fairly average English pop songstrel; Danny O’ Donoghue, unremarkable lead
singer with Irish soft rockers, The Script; and the fatuously monickered will.i.am
of hip hop outfit, The Black-Eyed Peas, who cheerfully and accurately admitted
that he was more of a producer / songwriter than a singer.
Anyway, in later rounds the competitors took part in a
knockout competition as players in Team Tom v. Team Jesse, for instance,
eventually arriving at an overall winner. The novelty value of the early
‘blind’ rounds helped The Voice out-perform its rival X Factor, but it soon lost ground
dramatically once the judges, who also operated as mentors and coaches to their
charges, failed to provide the waspish put-downs associated with Emperor Simon
Cowell & Co. in the Coliseum over
on ITV.
Almost without doubt, we can assume that, even at the peak
of his vocal ability, Dylan would not even have progressed beyond the pre-TV
auditions, let alone the televised ‘blind’ stage. But – and here’s the thing –
neither would have, say, Randy Newman, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen,
Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Mark Knopfler, John Lydon, Ian Dury, Jarvis
Cocker or P. J. Harvey…
The performers on these shows are persuaded to operate
within very limited parameters: they’re predominantly solo singers; the
material they’re offered is non-original and overwhelmingly mainstream; and the
expectation from the programme-makers (and that fostered in the audience) is
that they will tend to over-sing in the manner of Whitney Houston
and Maria Carey. One X-Factor winner,
Alexandra Burke, who has gone on to become a successful chart act, epitomises
the sort of melismatic mess of ultra-emoting that led to her covering Leonard
Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ as her debut single – clearly without the vaguest notion
of what the song was about and actually getting the lyric wrong! Not that it
mattered to her producer or public who duly took it to the top of the charts.
The history of popular music features a procession of
strikingly individual singers with, more often not, untrained voices. The way they sing is not so much a style as a
extension of their thought-processes and personality, especially if, like my
list above, they write their own songs.
By and large, most modern pop singers are directed to sing
in the prevailing style of the day, whilst trained classical and operatic
singers tend to not so much interpret the canon as repeat it. When
young-fellow-my-lad Dylan cheekily compared himself to Caruso, there was a
serious edge to his assertion that pointed towards a growing democratization of
the culture during the early 1960s. It is no exaggeration to maintain that
Dylan opened the door for Randy Newman, Lou Reed et al to find their own places
on the airwaves and in the marketplace.
Thus it was that Dylan encouraged pop music to evolve more
creatively – as compared to the relative stasis of classical technique - and
for its voices to become even more individual and varied. Although jazz-based
singers like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald exerted a quite
diverse influence before and after Dylan, they were broadly conventional
artists. More outré vocalists such as Al Jolson, Louis Jordan, Hank Williams,
Little Richard, Howlin’Wolf, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Mick Jagger and Aretha
Franklin were also highly influential and can be added to my initial list of
atypical performers.
If we must delineate, then it is into this more radical
parade of course, that Dylan belongs and, to some extent, leads. That
tremendous talent, Elvis Presley might straddle both the conventional and
unconventional territory, although his early impact was more to do with him
being new and white rather than truly original. He did nevertheless provide the
catalyst for the modern era of Rock Music.
It is, however, The Beatles, far more than, say, Sinatra,
Presley or Dylan who provide the most shining example of putting Art on the
Chart. No act has ever been more simultaneously popular and artistic and
innovative than The Beatles – and let’s not forget that, in Lennon and
McCartney, they not only had two
great singers, but in Harrison, a good, if
limited one and, in Starr, a distinctive, if even more limited one.
‘My voice is really
warm,
It’s just that it
ain’t got no form,
But it’s just like a
dead man’s last pistol shot, baby’
( from ‘She’s Your
Lover Now’ (1966))
One of the qualities associated with great singing is
soulfulness – that grainy gospel sound that seems to lend extra sincerity and
meaning to the voice. But soul is a slippery and subjective quality. Is it
merely another genre-label or does it actually indicate a more profound type of
singer? Our kneejerk list of great soul singers would surely include Ray
Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin and may well
feature a host of other predominantly black
singers. As with so many of the tropes which form our understanding of
contemporary pop music, Soul really hit its stride during the 1960s when it
spawned – if you can keep up with the
colouring – the first batch of UK white Blues and Soul singers such as
Dusty Springfield, Van Morrison, Steve Winwood, Chris Farlowe, Steve Marriott,
Joe Cocker and Rod Stewart et al. Could they really be Soul singers if they
weren’t black Americans with a Gospel background? Or as The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah
Band amusingly sang, ‘Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?’
Those British singers certainly seem more soulful to my ears
than some of the more conventional exponents of the genre that have emerged
subsequently – Luther Vandross, James Ingram and Michael Bolton, for instance.
As far as I’m concerned, one can quite easily make a case for Frank Sinatra and
John Lennon as occasional soul singers, but would it be stretching the term too
much for it to include one Bob Dylan?
Well, Blood On The
Tracks (1975) would appear to be a strong candidate for soul singing by
Dylan. The passion and sincerity of his singing on that record is remarkable.
It is not, however, a genre soul
album, in the way that Nashville Skyline is a Country album or the so-called ‘trilogy of Christian
albums’ from 1979-81 are Gospel albums (especially Saved (1980)). Those three sets, incidentally, show him to be a
more than competent Gospel singer.
But soulfulness has certainly been an element in Dylan’s
singing over the years, as indeed, it is with most great singers. Dylan’s
revolutionary impact on the history of popular music was not purely to do with
his extraordinary song-writing. As well as his image and attitude, it was that
voice that made the difference.
During the earlier period of his recording career, Dylan
quickly demonstrated a mastery of the Folk style and an ability to render his
own love songs in a gentle, sensitive manner (i.e. ‘Girl of The North Country’,
‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’, ‘One Too Many Mornings’). Comedic songs such as ‘I
Shall Be Free’, ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare’ and ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ were
delivered with a sly coolness that impressed as much it amused. His apparently
effortless combining of American hip slang from the street and from films with
more formal idioms drawn from the Folk tradition and literature lent his voice
glamour, if not conventional beauty.
The intellect behind his songs and the confident authority
of his performances gave philosophical songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, ‘A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ more of a prophetic
and political edge. It became increasingly clear that Dylan had at his vocal
command a number of tones, frequently negative ones only rarely, if ever heard
in the rather saccharine world of pop music’s happy / sad romantic topography.
Outrage, for example, (‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’); righteousness
(‘Masters Of War’); wistfulness (‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’); scorn (‘Ballad Of
A Thin Man’); melancholia (‘Visions Of Johanna’); accusation (‘Positively 4th
Street’); bitterness (‘Like A Rolling Stone’); and disgust – I’m fairly certain
that no-one had ever communicated this as startlingly as Dylan does when he
delivers the line, ‘and you’re siiick
of all this repetition’ in ‘Queen Jane Approximately’, not to mention the
sustained revulsion of ‘It’s Alright, Ma
(I’m Only Bleeding’.
In an era when establishment norms were being challenged by
ever more active, literate and politicised younger people, it was not surprising
that Dylan would be described as ‘The Spokesman Of His Generation’. Neither was
it simply a case of the subject-matter of the songs dictating the style of his
performance of them. It was the breadth of attitude and emotion that Dylan
brought to them as a singer.
Not that it was all negative waves being emitted: Dylan’s
powers of vocal expression extended to the yearning sense of wonder present in
‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’; the empathy of ‘To
Ramona’; the joie de vivre in the face of adversity of ‘Rainy Day Women # 12
& 35’ and the lusty mischief of ‘I Want You’. When he returned to recording
after his temporary retirement in 1966, he did so with a markedly sunnier
disposition (usually attributed by biographers to a time of settled family life
in the rural environs of Woodstock).
The period from 1967-74 – i.e. The
Basement Tapes through Planet Waves –
yields up more positive, happy songs than any other in Dylan’s career.
This sequence was broken by the trauma which pervades Blood On The Tracks - an alternative
title for which could have been ‘Marriage On The Rocks’ – although the brief
reconciliation with his first wife, Sarah, before their eventual divorce, was
glimpsed in the more positive moments on Desire
(1976).
Notwithstanding the New Testament elements of the Christian
albums, it has been largely doom and gloom ever since, often on an apocalyptic
scale. Eventually Dylan’s singing became more and more gnarled, darkened and
trapped by the grim artistic weather that overshadowed so many of his songs and
the diminishing returns of his vocal range. Albums like Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind
both sounded like they might have been his last, such was the despairing
mood conveyed by his singing and the emotional wilderness of the songs’
terrain.
In my view, some of Dylan’s most potent vocal performances
from this period and beyond were left off the original releases, but they can
be found on ‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Tell
Tale Signs – 1989-2006), another
collection which reminds us yet again what an unreliable judge of his own
material Dylan often is.
Dylan has, however, kept on keeping on. The smoking ruin of
his voice remains an expressive if mortally reduced instrument. The battered
ballads of broken love are drawn up from an apparently bottomless well. Like a
novelist able to dream up plots year on year, Dylan continues to find ways of
retelling the micro-narratives of his songs. On his latest record,
Tempest (2012) - lyrically his most interesting
collection for a time - there’s a whimsical centenary reimagining of the
Titanic going down; a touching, if rather odd homage to his old friend and
rival, John Lennon; and a couple of blood-soaked revenge dramas scattered over
his usual stamping ground. The singing, now into its seventies, is geriatric
beyond its years - really sounding like the ‘sand and glue’ as David Bowie
described it in his 1971 ‘Song For Bob Dylan’ - but we can be sure that Dylan
has no intention of going gently into any good night.
In that historic review in the September 29, 1961 issue of
The New York Times, reproduced on the back cover of Dylan’s debut album, Robert
Shelton considered the vocal performance by the twenty years old singer he’d
witnessed at Gerde’s Folk
City club the night
before. He presciently summed it up thus:-
‘Mr.
Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously
trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand
musing in melody on his porch. All the ‘husk’ and ‘bark’ are
left
on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs.’
‘Mr. Dylan’, in his seventy-second year, has long been able
to evoke that ‘rude beauty’ of the deep Blues and Folk tradition. What’s left
of his once astonishing singing voice is almost all ‘husk and bark’ with
‘searing intensity’ now probably beyond his reach (‘Pay In Blood’ from Tempest bears out these contentions).
Ultimately, however, the correct response to all my carping,
should be, ‘So what?’ If Dylan had died, or at least retired from singing after
say, Oh Mercy, his audience would
still have a fabulous, if chequered, canon of work to last them a life-time.
The same might even be said if his career had wound up with the underrated Street Legal in 1978. And if that
motorcycle accident in 1966 had been fatal, then the world would have been left
with a body of work as perfect, in its way, as that of The Beatles.
Perfection, though, isn’t everything.
C. Ian Roberts 2012
This article originally appeared in ISIS (issue 167), the international journal of all things Dylan.
‘With its major chords, rising choruses,
close harmonies and sparkling guitars, there’s more than enough sunshine here
to banish any rainy day.’
