• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 433 0

on Blonde, wired out of his skull in the studio, just before the songs were recorded, while the sessionmen sat around waiting on him, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. It has been suggested to me that there are better things to do with albums than try to figure out what drug the artist was on when he made them, but I think this was one case where the chemical definitely affected the content of the music. Those lyrics were a speed trip, and if he really did spend days on end sweating over lines like “Your streetcar visions which you place on the grass,” then he is stupider than we ever gave him credit for.

Now. I know I stand at this point in possible danger of plunging quill-first into full-scale Webermanism,4 but I do think that if you are going to assert that a piece of music is the unburdening of your soul down to the personal pronouns, then you should tell the truth. I also think that if he is capable of lying about and exploiting his own marriage to make himself look a bit more pertinent, he is certainly capable of using the newsy victims of his topical toons with even less attention to moral amenities. “Hurricane,” like many Dylan songs of his distant past, purports to be a diatribe expressing abhorrence of racism, but there are many forms of inverted, benevolent prejudice known to the liberal mentality, and I find a song like “Mozambique” rather curious:

I’d like to spend some time in Mozambique …

All the couples dancing cheek to cheek

It's very nice to stay a week or two …

There's lots of pretty girls in Mozambique

And plenty time for good romance…

Magic in a magical land

Ah yes, a beautiful, simple people, aren’t they, Mr. Christian? Unfettered by the corrupting complexities of civilization, no? So primitively pure and natchl, just fuckin’ and a’dancin’ barefoot there on the beach. Maybe that's what enables Rubin Carter to sit “like Buddha in a prison cell.”

Which brings us to Dylan's demonology, and the biggest lie of all. Now, just like Blood on the Tracks was ultimately redolent of little more than mixed-up confusion as regards romantic obsessions, so a line like “All the criminals in their coats and their ties/Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise” is not exactly going to enlighten us as to the subtleties of social injustice today. Because the processes of oppression, however brutal, are subtle; Ralph J. Gleason was right when he extrapolated old Dylan lyrics into “No more us and them,” and Dylan himself, in the mid-Seventies, is still playing cowboys and Indians.

I said earlier that Dylan was merely using Carter and George Jackson as fodder for the propagation of the continuing myth of his own “relevance.” It's difficult to prove that from “Hurricane,” in part because the performance is so drivingly persuasive, in part because Dylan does seem, at least superficially, to have his facts down: a man was framed for a crime he most likely didn’t commit, and the probable reason he was framed was that he preached black liberation in an atmosphere of white supremacy. Of course, the fact that he was framed doesn’t prove that he was innocent of the crime, either; but for once Dylan's simplistic broadsides seem to have coincided with reality, justice, and Rubin Carter being on the side of the angels.

But I have to make a confession: I don’t give a damn about Rubin Carter, whether he is guilty or innocent, or about racism in New Jersey. At least for the purposes of the present inquiry, all I care about is Bob Dylan, and whether he is being straight with me or not. I don’t think he is, anywhere, and I think you can find all the evidence you need in Desire's longest cut, the ponderous, sloppy, numbingly boring eleven-minute ballad “Joey,” about yet another folk hero/loser/martyr, mobster pg=>“Crazy Joey” Gallo, who was murdered in a gang war in Little Italy in 1972.

New York City readers may not believe this, but it's probable that most of the people, especially young ones, who buy this album across the rest of America do not know who in the hell Joey Gallo was. Since this song is hardly going