In a 'Modern' Mode
Bob Dylan's new album comes from the now - as he sees it, of course
By Chris Morris
The title of Bob Dylan's new album, Modern Times (Columbia), which arrives in stores on Tuesday, is clearly meant to be ironic. Little on the 10-song, hour-long disc might be considered "modern," in the 21st-century understanding of the word; instead - like the rest of Dylan's works over the last 15 years - it appears to emanate from some long-distant epoch.
Since his earliest days as a performer, Dylan has been compared to another genius in the American grain, and it's tempting to see the title of the present album as a sly reference to the musician's cinematic double: Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times was another work that operated in its own time zone. Released seven years after the advent of sound, Chaplin's satire of "mechanized" society was issued with a musical score, but without dialogue. The only time the Little Tramp was heard in the film, he was singing a nonsensical song.
Like Chaplin, Dylan stays in his artistic comfort zone and cleaves to familiar methods on his Modern Times. As with his first record of the current millennium, 2001's "Love and Theft," the album was produced by its author (under his wintry pseudonym "Jack Frost") and cut very live with his working band, whose members now include guitarists Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball, multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, bassist Tony Garnier, and (playing with brushes most of the time) drummer George Recile.
The advance hype for Modern Times suggests that the work is the third entry in a triptych begun by Dylan's 1997 album-of-the-year Grammy winner, Time Out of Mind, and continued with "Love and Theft." This doesn't strike me as quite right, though qualitatively the new album is easily the equal of the last two. This '06 shot is more like an extension of its immediate, half-decade-old predecessor; its crispness, tunefulness, and almost nonchalant playfulness here reflect the droll and jubilant songs on its five-year-old double. Save the closing track, there's little of the brooding darkness, and none of the highly produced atmosphere manufactured by Daniel Lanois, heard on Dylan's nearly decade-old artistic rebirth.
That renaissance followed two collections of archive-dusting covers, Good As I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), and the echoes of those two humble solo projects continue to reverberate in the work Dylan is producing today. There we heard him getting back in touch with his sources - Mississippi John Hurt, Lonnie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Frank Hutchison, Blind Willie McTell, etc., etc. - and those sources now flow freely and directly into Dylan's music once again. There's no pretense of contemporaneity in his style of the moment; this is stuff that revels in its own archaisms.
Even more so than on "Love and Theft," Dylan pillages the past unapologetically on the new album. Three of the songs are straight rewrites of well-known blues: "Rollin' and Tumblin'" reimagines Hambone Willie Newbern's 1929 "Roll and Tumble Blues"; "The Levee's Gonna Break" retools Memphis Minnie's 1930 "When the Levee Breaks"; and "Someday Baby" purloins the hook of Muddy Waters's 1955 opus "Trouble No More." Beyond these outright borrowings, Dylan uses standard blues lines as lyrical seasoning: "Goin' where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog," "I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall," and "Hand me down my walkin' cane" are just a few of the ancient images that float by.
Though the blues remains Dylan's primary resource, he admits other antique sounds and styles here as well. As he has on the last two albums, he tries his hand at a kind of bright, bouncy rockabilly, drained of its menace, on the set-opening "Thunder on the Mountain." More deliciously, he continues with a sort of mutant attempt at crooning - though Dylan's hoarse, frequently croaking singing can never be mistaken for the smooth pop stylings of '20s and '30s crooners like Bing Crosby and Russ Colombo. But the lilting sway and understated delivery of "Spirit on the Water" and "Beyond the Horizon" suggest the heyday of crooning without really replicating it; the latter song bears a so-obvious-it's-audacious reference to Crosby's 1945 hit "The Bells of St. Mary's."
"Modern times," indeed. Dylan's notion of "modernity" continues to be tied to the imagery of the early 20th century, and even before; his protagonists ride the rails and work on family-owned farms. More often than not, he will insert some element of the present day into his music just to turn around and duck it.
"Thunder on the Mountain" opens with a lyrical mention of one "Alicia Keys," but it quickly becomes obvious that the singer's Alicia Keys, "born in Hell's Kitchen," is in no way related to the pop performer. The song "Workingman's Blues Part 2" - with its titular nod to recent tour mate Merle Haggard's 1969 "Workin' Man Blues" - notes with a straight face that "the buying power of the proletariat's gone down," but, just when you think Bob is going to excoriate high gas prices, he continues, "Well, they burned my barn and they stole my horse." And in "The Levee's Gonna Break," an imminent flood threatens the countryside, and "some people on the road carryin' everything that they own," but Dylan is more concerned with the ways of his errant lover than he is with the devastation a catastrophe - say, a Hurricane Katrina - might wreak.
Well, Bob always said he wasn't a topical songwriter. So what is Modern Times about, when all is said and done? Its greatest subject is the affairs of men and women; it's almost surprising to find an album penned by a 65-year-old man that is so rich in romantic, and even erotic, content. The set is full of caressing, blissfully swinging love songs; into that category fall "Spirit on the Water," "When the Deal Goes Down," "Beyond the Horizon," and "Nettie Moore." (Has anyone born since the 1920s actually borne the name "Nettie?") The blues - "Someday Baby," "The Levee's Gonna Break," "Rollin' and Tumblin'" - stack up the genre's clichés about women in amusing style, and toss in the occasional original curve ball; Dylan sings on the latter number, in one of the collection's many laugh-out-loud moments, "This woman's so crazy, I swear I ain't gonna touch another one for years."
Modern Times moves into inspired territory in its final track, the nearly nine-minute "Ain't Talkin'." This sprawling song is one of those unique Dylan creations, an epic that plays like a monument built of the shards of a thousand exploded tunes. It begins with its narrator getting mugged in "the mystic garden," and ends with him standing "at the world's end." In between is a veering narrative, rich with the reverberations of traditional balladry, which surveys death, vengeance, and, seemingly, the approach of the apocalypse.
It's an exclamation point to a vibrant album bursting with wit, charm, emotion, and deeply sampled musical history. Modern Times is what we have come to expect from Bob Dylan in autumn: another masterpiece that doesn't make too much of itself.
Published: 08/24/2006
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