Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [31]
But why, in 1975, should Dylan return to what, in such a year, passes for activism? Because he's having trouble coming up with meaningful subject matter closer to home, that's why: either that or whatever is going on in his personal life is so painful and fucked up he is afraid or unwilling to confront it in his art. And, again, one is not sure that one can honestly blame him. When Blood on the Tracks was released, I felt as ambivalent about it as it was about its subject matter, and I remained that way. After initially dismissing it on one hearing as a sprawling, absurdly pretentious mess whose key was the ridiculously spiteful “Idiot Wind,” I found myself drawn back to it repeatedly by a current that I was not at all convinced was entirely wholesome; I would get drunk and throw it on, finding profound aphorisms alternating with oblique poetry, belching outbursts of muddled enthusiasm: “Goddamn, he's still got it!” Then I would sober up and it would sound, once again, dull, overlong, energyless, the aphorisms trite and obvious, the poetry a garbled parody of the old Dylan. But I persisted, there was something there that mattered to me, and I ultimately found out what it was. I discovered that I only really wanted to play this record whenever I had a fight with someone I was falling in love with— we would reach some painful impasse of words or wills, she would go home, and I would sit up all night with my misery and this album, playing it over and over, wallowing in Dylan's wretched reflection of my own confusion: “Women—who can figger ‘em?” I imagine it was also a big hit with the recently (or soon to be) divorced.
At length I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best innocuous as a crying towel, and certainly was not going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women, myself, or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to be. Which was simply not enough.
So I looked forward to Desire. Maybe Bob had managed to figger the critters out in some flash of revelation, or could at least provide some helpful tips for the rest of us involved in the great Struggle. Perhaps, at last, he had something honestly uplifting to say about men and women, male bonding, pet training, and all the other baffling forms of interpersonal relationships known to this planet. So if it seems like I’m hard on him now, if I seem unduly vitriolic, it's only because (a) everything I say is the truth, and (b) I myself was such a sucker I still looked to him to tell me something and now must suffer the embarrassment which is my just deserts.
Because Desire is a sham and a fakeout. Ignoring the “El Paso” rewrites and ersatz Kristofferson plodders like “One More Cup of Coffee” (which is easy), we come at length (and it reflects neither generosity nor inspiration that side two of this album is almost thirty minutes long) to “Sara,” wherein Dylan, masks off, naming names, rhapsodizes over his wife in mawkish images (“sweet virgin angel… radiant jewel”) cheap bathos (when in doubt, drag in the kids playing in the sand on the beach), simple groveling (“You must forgive me my unworthiness”), and, most indicatively of Desire as a whole, outright lies. To wit: “I’d taken the cure and I’d just gotten through/Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writin’ ‘Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ for you.”
Bullshit. I have it on pretty good authority that Dylan wrote “Sad Eyed Lady,” as well as about half of the rest of Blonde