Still Rolling Down Highway 61

Back in high school, English teacher Mr. Drew assigned our class The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. The poem was way over all of our heads. This was not because understanding it requires intelligence but because it requires erudition: a depth of learning that high school students (bar the occasional world-class prodigy) simply don’t have. Mr. Drew was aware of that. He expected us to flounder (as we did), but he sometimes liked to push us beyond our limits anyway in order to make us at least aware of things that some of us might learn to appreciate later on. He was right to do it, much as I would have disagreed at the time.

Bob Dylan’s latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways is not remotely as abstruse as Eliot, yet that old English class came to mind because I think younger listeners might flounder when they listen to this deeply retrospective album – and maybe not even know they are floundering. Accumulated “stuff” of the sort that fills the head of a 79-year-old autodidact of both high and low culture flows into Dylan’s lyrics. “I contain multitudes,” he says. And so he does. That said, Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s best album in more than 20 years – maybe more than 40.

I’ve mentioned before that having a hip older sister was huge advantage when I was growing up. I was anything but hip, but at least thanks to Sharon I heard music and was exposed to trends when they were still cutting edge rather than last year’s news. Accordingly, the first Bob Dylan album I heard play on the home stereo was in 1963. I still have her vinyl of Dylan’s game-changing 1965 Highway 61 Revisited. His 1967 Greatest Hits album (with its poster inside) was one of the must-have albums of the ‘60s. While his popularity faded rapidly thereafter, he never went away or became a nostalgia act. He repeatedly nudged into the Top 40 charts with the occasional single (e.g. “Shelter from the Storm” in ’75, “Everything is Broken” in ‘89) and album (e.g. Time Out of Mind in ‘97), though one gets the feeling he didn’t much care by that point if his songs were popular. I don’t know if he has another album left in him after this one but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Sis's vintage vinyl still on the shelf 

No breezy pop hit is lurking on this album. No one ever bought a Dylan album to hear dulcet vocalizations, and nowadays his voice sounds like gravel in a churning concrete mixer. While sometimes musically interesting, his albums aren’t noted for stellar instrumental work either. (Covers of his songs can be a different matter, such as Jimi Hendrix’ classic version of “All Along the Watchtower.”) Dylan always has been about the lyrics, and it’s not a bad idea to read them when listening to Rough and Rowdy Ways for the first time. It’s not necessary, but not a bad idea.

The 17-minute “Murder Most Foul” about the JFK assassination and its aftermath was released separately as a single a few months ago. This event remains an inflection point in the American psyche in ways no longer obvious to the 85% of the population born after 1963, but it is still no less pertinent for that. In the double-cd set the number gets its own disc. The other songs are a mix of rock, folk, and blues, which Bob’s gravel voice suits better than one might think. The lyrics make as much straightforward sense as any by Dylan ever do, but they poke at our memories more than usual. Beyond the blatant by-name call-outs to Elvis, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and others, the references to Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and historical figures that permeate the verses are obvious enough. However, you might have to be a Boomer or older to catch right away the allusion to Roy Orbison in “I go where only the lonely can go” or to Ricky Nelson in his mention of Mary Lou, or to Barbara Lewis in “hello stranger,” or to Janis Joplin in “a ball and chain,” or to Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) in “People tell me I ought to try a little tenderness.” (An instrumental of “Try a Little Tenderness” is the soundtrack to the title sequence of the movie.) Referential lines of this ilk are in every song on the album: some jump out more than others. All of these bits of songs, movies, people, history, and events are parts of who we are today. They are part of those too young to have experienced any of them first hand, for they form much of the general cultural background regardless.

Dylan is sometimes grim (“I've already outlived my life by far”) and often funny (“And I ask myself, ‘What would Julius Caesar do?’”), but while he swims in the past he never drowns in it. He hasn’t chosen to sit on his Nobel Prize and rotely sing “Positively 4^th Street” and “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” to septuagenarians who haven’t purchased a new album since 1979. He writes and performs new songs for whomever might happen to appreciate them. The results this time are outstanding.

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Track 2: “False Prophet”