Hell is Open and All the Devils are Here – 3

This represents my attempt to give a considered judgement on ‘Tempest’..

To do this requires a brief historical introduction, I think.

As Bob himself has admiited in Chronicles, he went through a severe creative slump which ran, say, from the early to late 1980s. This was succeeded by a revival of sorts which saw him release two fine, if rather low-key albums, in 89 and 90 (‘Oh Mercy‘ and ‘Under the Red Sky‘).

Then Dylan made the two albums of folk covers, which – to my mind – were vital to his recovering his creative spark. Making them, Bob re-engaged with what had drawn him into music in the first place…

This paved the way for what I would regard as his last masterpiece, Time Out of Mind. Time Out of Mind had that coherence of mood and vision which all truly great albums share (like say, Astral Weeks by Morrison, Marjory Razorblades by Kevin Coyne or Pink Moon by Nick Drake.).

While I thought ‘Love and Theft’ was a fine album (with a number of great songs) I thought it lacked that coherence…

After Love & Theft, however, Dylan’s albums became even more ‘grab-bag’. There was also an increased reliance on unacknowledged borrowings from other people’s work. And, whereas in the past, Dylan had transformed his source material into completely new works of art (for example, ‘Hard Rain’ sounds very little like ‘Lord Randal’ in its finished form: ‘Chimes of Freedom’ may be modelled partly on ‘Trinity Bells’ but is a infinitely superior and very different song to it, and even ‘Blowing in the wind’ does not really resemble ‘Auction block’ to that great a degree), nowadays Dylan’s borrowings added very little to their sources & were, more often than not, markedly inferior to them.

In terms of his lyrics, it seemms to me that Dylan was again suffering from a form of writer’s block. To cover that, he was now using a form of re-arranging lines drawn from old blues and folk songs and 19th century American poetry, often with little regard to any kind of structural coherence or, indeed, any form of real meaning at all…

‘Tempest’ seemed to me to mark a high-point in this process – combining these kind of careless, often sloppy lyrics, with leaden arrangements makes it, I think, easily the worst album Dylan has ever made…

I set out wanting to like the album, but I was put off – not so much its mediocrity (every artist is entitled to an off day) but by the the air of meanspiritedness and artistic dishonesty that hangs over it…

‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’: Some Thoughts on Bob Dylan’s Tempest – 2

Was, by chance, reading an old article, ‘A Storyteller’s Shoptalk’ by the great Raymond Carver (what a pity Dylan recent work wasn’t influenced by him rather than the vastly over-rated and mid-numbingly tedious novels of Cormac McCarthy). In it, Carver argues that:

“Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else. ”The World According to Garp” is of course the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah. Every great, or even every very good writer, makes the world over according to his own specifications.”

It is precisely this sense of a genuine individual vision that I find lacking in Dylan’s current work…

Funnily enough, recently went to an exhibition of Francis Bacon’s paintings here in Sydney & each painting had that hallmark of a strikingly original take on the world (even when, funnily enough, they were clearly influenced by or based on other people’s work)…

At the same time, I have been reading Yukio Mishima’s novel Spring Snow and (disliking his politics as intensely as I do) throughout it, I had the sense of a great artist being true to his particular, perhaps slightly warped, view of the world…

The sense I have now is that where Dylan’s borrowings were once the spark, as it were,which drove the creation of intensely individual works, nowadays they serve to cover (what in Tempest’s case, at least) appears to be a dearth of real inspiration on his own part…

‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’: Some Thoughts on Bob Dylan’s Tempest

In relation to Tempest, I recently found the following quote from Greil Marcus, which, rather surprisingly, summarises my own feelings about Dylan’s current band very well:

‘The band that Bob Dylan works with now is not a strong band. They’re not a challenging band, except for Charlie Sexton, the lead guitar player. There’s no one with an individual sensibility, with his own grasp of a song and where to take it, to challenge Dylan as a singer. The music for the most part is backup. It’s often a repetitive figure played over and over again, so that all your focus is on the singing, on the voice. But Bob Dylan has always sung best, he’s always been most alive, combative and finding surprises in a song, when a band is challenging him, when the musicians are going somewhere he couldn’t have anticipated. I don’t think that’s happening here.’

What I think stands out out on Tempest is how mechanical the Band sounds throughout – except, perhaps, for ‘Duquesne Whistle’ and the guitar solo on ‘scarlet Town’. On the rest of the album what is lacking is the looseness and the sense of spontaneity that you find in Dylan’s best work. There seems to be no space for the musicians to express themselves in.

This leads, I think, to the sense of tedium and monotony that sets in on the longer songs on the album…

In the same piece, however, Marcus also praises ‘Tin angel’ – which I find a monotonous song, with lyrics which are markedly inferior to those of the Child ballads on which the song is based…

Indeed, I don’t really understand how anybody can see clunky lines like this as good…especially by Dylan’s standards:

‘He pondered the future of his fate
To wait another day would be far too late’

or
‘You are making my heart feel sick
Put your clothes back on, double-quick” (The Boss)’

and

“Oh, my dear, you must be blind
He’s a gutless ape with a worthless mind”

These are surely contenders for the next edition of ‘The Stuffed Owl’.

I also feel as if part of the problem with ‘Tempest’ is the way in which Dylan works in strict forms (like the ballad form of both ‘Tin Angel’ and “Tempest’) which require a kind of regular rhyme and rhythm. It seems to me that most of Dylan’s best work as a lyric writer comes in looser forms where he uses internal rhymes, stretching out lines, etc. etc…

It takes a very particular kind of skill and disciple to work in those kind of forms and avoid becoming montonous…

To my mind, at least at present, Dylan does not have that kind of concentrated discipline anymore. I also think his borrowings add to this problem, because he is continually faced with the difficulty of finding rhymes for lines he has not written – and this sets up many of those times where he lapses into bathos or into, as Michael Gray has pointed out, a kind of McGonnigalesque style …