Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Designer
and Engineer Dept.: Mr. Denis Shain of Mossyrock,
Washington, writes in with "An Open Letter
to Bob Dylan" in the Rocket's
October 22 issue. After confessing "to"
Bob that he hasn't listened to much past Bringing
It All Back Home, Mr. Shain goes on to
explain that Dylan's latest album Time Out of
Mind "began to wear on me until I found
it unlistenable. Then, I realized what it was:
The use of the `I' is pathologically obsessive,
with phrases like `I think I,' `I just don't know
what I'm going to do,' `I was all right 'til I,'
or `I'd like to think I could control myself.' I
tried to come up with my own sentence using more
than three `I's, but it's tough. I guess that's
where we separate the true poets.
"The word `I'
(referring to the songwriter)," Shain
continues, clicker firmly in hand, "was used
283 times on this album. If you include `me' and
`my' with `I,' it comes to 389
occurrences...Classics like `Blowing in the
Wind,' `Like A Rolling Stone,' [and] `Ballad of a
Thin Man,' use not one `I,' `me,' or `my.' In
fact, the whole album Highway 61 Revisited used
`I' only 47 times and `I,' `me,' and `my' 78
times..."
He goes on to
compute the average uses of those three words per
song on Time Out of Mind (25.8) versus Highway
61 Revisited (8.5).
As you may be able
to ascertain from a certain tone, I find Mr.
Shain's reasoning right up there with the
apocryphal little old lady who cracked The
Catcher in the Rye and totaled up every
"damn," "goddamn," and
"fuck." A little like assessing the
airworthiness of a Spitfire on the contours of
the scantily-clad painted pinup on one side of
the nose, I'm tempted to say, but in closer
collusion with the metaphor at hand, it's
probably more like judging a Ramones album by the
number of audible "ONETWOTHREEFO"s, a
Poison album by the number of times Rikki Rocket
loses the beat, or a Rush album by the number of
veiled existentialist references scrawled over
the science fiction art on the inner sleeve with
Neil Peart's name in parentheses at the top.
So what do I
think about Time Out of Mind? Asked that
question as recently as last night, I would have
said I hadn't decided, that I was still knocking
my head against it hoping that the next knock
would push me through its surface, make me notice
something else behind the fact that I could
usually guess from the end of the first line of a
couplet what word the second line would end with.
It is an album of persevering in the face of
apparent hopelessness, and so probably it makes a
difference if you've had some bad news in your
life lately. I had some bad news just an hour or
two earlier today, and it's certainly helped the
album sink in. The chilly organ poured over the
beats of "Cold Irons Bound," the slow
disintegration implicit in the line "it's
not dark yet/but it's getting there" (we
should savor what we have while we still have it,
you might be able to savor losing what you have),
the piano-backed gentle pleadings of "To
Make You Feel My Love,"--they all speak to a
soul wounded and not sure if recovery is
possible, wishing with a heavy heart for lost
loves, lost youth, lost possibility.
Time Out of
Mind reminds me most of the other record
I've spun recently, Promised Land by
Robert "Bilbo" Walker, on the Rooster
Blues label. I took Promised Land down
to my neighborhood bar the night the Marlins won
the World Series (now there's a pastime
custom-made for Mr. Shain), and after several
beers during the game and oh, just a few more in
the aftermath, I asked the bartender to put it
on. The guy next to me leaned over and said we
should turn it off because it made him feel like
cutting his throat. Then another guy came up to
order a beer and asked if this was my CD. I
nodded yes, and he said this is really fantastic,
thank you. That's has been typical of public
reaction to music I like or at least intrigued
with, and typically, I remember the first guy's
timbre and tone much better than the second guy.
But I can see Time
Out of Mind going down to the same pub and
earning the same reactions.
The fascinating
element of Promised Land--the debut
album of a sixtysomething juke-joint stomper
whose amazing first-person life story comes
complete inside the CD booklet--is its sense of
distance, how voices and instruments seem
coal-filtered through the landscape and the
history that spawned them, ghosts of things that
once were, rather than things in and of
themselves. Time Out of Mind, not
recorded in a tiny Mississippi studio, has this
same ghostly presence in sound, but it's haunted
also by the songwriter's old personas--the
smartass, the cocksure rebel, the Christian, and
the polemicist loom large in their absence,
remembered against the voice on this record that
speaks mostly simple, direct phrases,
constructing complex but always solidly-built
emotional edifices. "I got new eyes,"
comments Dylan towards the end of
"Highlands," an epic that just might be
also be a huge shaggy dog story, "everything
seems far away." Oh Mercy, Dylan's
last critically-acclaimed album before this one,
was largely the sound of the man giving
up--graceful, stately, gently, but surrender all
the same. Everything is broken, he sang. We live
in a political world. Period. End of story. Time
Out of Mind must be what the next step past
simple giving up sounds like.
I still don't know
what to do with my life. "Same old rat
race/Same old life in a cage" runs another
line from "Highlands" and I still don't
know if I should shun the cage or walk right into
the machinery. I don't think the machine would
find me worthy of drone status even if I did
throw myself on the mercy of its spinnerettes.
But I'm listening to a man who I think is
thinking some of the same things, if not
necessarily for the same reasons. Is all regret
the same, all ambivalence, all inability to
understand? Scientists don't tell. But if you've
picked up your telephone or opened your door to
find a hobbling of the soul crawling up your
noise, spend an hour with Dr. Bob. Misery loves
company, and if you aren't grateful, rest assured
he'll make up for it from his end.
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