I first seriously entered the world of Bob Dylan with ‘Blood on the Tracks’ in 1975. I was 18 years old, making the transition from high school to college, and mostly knew Dylan from album cuts on rock radio like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Jimi Hendrix’s cover of “All Along the Watchtower.” I was a big reader of the music press and rock history books, so I knew this singer-songwriter was a kind of secular God for scribes and other ‘60s souls.
But ‘Blood on the Tracks’ was the first Dylan album I experienced contemporaneous with its release. Unlike all the Dylan songs I’d heard previously, which came weighed down with the analysis and memories of others, I heard these songs through my ears alone. What I heard in so many of them — “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” — were noir styled tales of sex, violence, lost love, saloons, puns, jokes, dead ends, crime, and restlessness — that stuck me as musical accompaniment to the hard boiled tales of James Cain, writer of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ and ‘Double Indemnity'.
Though the album was released in the mid-70s, there was a Depression era sense of desperation and sadness that I found in Dylan’s tone, not surprising as I came to understand his reverence for singers (and a world) that would have been part of his parent’s and grandparent’s lives. So many of his songs evoked “back woods heading South,” wandering, cursed, anger men — whether sung in first or third person — that the album felt like pieces of a novel to my teenaged soul.
So it feels like a confirmation of my youthful instincts reading Dylan’s ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’ and see the noir, damn near pulp fiction, prose of his new book. “In this song you’re the swindler who sold me a faulty bill of goods — beguiled me, double crossed me, and now you’re out of moves and soon you’ll be groaning with prolonged sufffering.” Or “You’re sitting in the shade, slumped out, anonymous, incognitom watching everything go by, unimpressed, hard-bitten — impenetrable.” Or “Drugstore cowboys, girl watchers, night owls — everybody and their uncle, you lighten them up and bleed them with ease. You give nightmares to people while they’re fully awake.”
If there’s a philosophy of modern song being offered by Dylan, its one that situates the sixty plus songs commented on as pieces of a long, fragmented novel — or perhaps scenes from a particularly colorful screenplay — that takes you into the mind of a motor mouthed, slightly tipsy, salesman who’s the highly unreliable narrator holding down the corner of the bar selling dreams, fake Rolexs and dubious cocaine.
There’s some sober music critic talk and historian tidbits laced throughout the book, but its pleasure is the wild descriptions of the world’s these songs inhabit through’s Dylan’s prose. He starts many of his chapters with “In this song” as we enter them, guided by his voice and vision. It’s a mid-20th century voice, one laced with a carnival barker’s seduction purr, like the characters in Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Nightmare Alley,’ determined to sell you tickets to see the electric lady or the Geek. When I purchased ‘Philosophy of Modern Song’ knew it wouldn’t be a traditional music book. It isn’t. It’s a journey through the backroads and hotel rooms of songs, both celebrated and lost, that create a shadow history of an American that may or may not actually have existed, but was sure fun to sing about. “The midnight rider wants to return things back to a pre-corporate order,” Dylan writes, “and wipe the slate clean”