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Bob Dylan - Together Through Life
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“I didn’t come here to deal with a doggone thing/I just came here to hear the drummer’s cymbal ring,” Bob Dylan snarls on “My Wife’s Home Town,” one of several blues stomps on his strikingly simple—and strikingly excellent—new album. (Turns out the little lady hails from hell.) He rasps about hard times (“State’s gone broke, the county’s dry”) and the woman who drives him mad with lust—but mostly, he revels in how banged-up and gruff his voice is with a lifetime of road dust corroding his lungs. The old song-and-dance man sings like he’s been gargling with bleach and chasing it with ammonia. When he lets out a lowdown chuckle at the end of the song, he sounds demented. Has any rock star gotten such a perverse kick out of old age? Together Through Life comes out a few weeks before Dylan’s 68th birthday, when he’ll be two years shy of where Muddy Waters’ tour of duty ended, and three years older than when Howlin’ Wolf went off to sit on top of the world. Even when he was a babyface punk in Cuban-heel boots, Dylan reveled in pretending to be world-weary and grizzled, like the blues and country veterans he idolized. Now that he’s ancient enough to be one of them, he’s having the time of his life. And the fact that he gets an honest–to–Woody Guthrie economic crash to sing about? Gravy....full text |
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Bob Dylan had the devil of a time working on the soundtrack for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, caught up in the director’s typically tempestuous war with the film’s producers over a movie they didn’t understand and eventually butchered, Dylan’s musical contributions suffering a similar fate in the fragmented version originally released in 1973. Hollywood, though, has been kinder since to Bob. Asked in 2000 to write something for LA Confidential director Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, he came up with “Things Have Changed”, his first new song since 1997’s Time Out Of Mind. It duly won him an Oscar and a Golden Globe – awards that could have as easily gone to “Cross The Green Mountain”, a sombre Civil War epic full of gloomy portent he wrote for 2003’s Gods And Generals. The song, however, was played over the closing credits of a film no-one went to see and before it was rehabilitated on last year’s Tell Tale Signs collection, was available only on a soundtrack CD hardly anyone had heard....full text |
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inspired by midcentury Chess and Sun label recordings, and indeed, the hearty ghosts of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf stomp through most tracks, with Doug Sahm and Edith Piaf stopping in for a dance or two. But John Bunyan? Leave it to Dylan to pull up some really old roots. Bunyan's 1679 "A Treatise of the Fear of God" may or may not be the inspiration for "Forgetful Heart," the most ominous song on this mostly romping collection. Dylanologists, such as the historian Sean Wilentz, have noted that "the fourth part of the day" that Dylan gently intones about in "I Feel a Change Coming On" refers to an Old Testament passage (Nehemiah 9:3, for the curious) about penitence and paying Heaven its due....full text |
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