Love and Theft
Two great Dylan records on the trot? Careful, you might just get what you wish for -and a good deal else besides.
By Andy Gill.
Bob Dylan. Love and Theft. Columbia.
Dylan's 43rd album, his first in four years. "I think of it as a greatest bits album," says Bob. "Without the hits - not yet, anyway."
IT'S BEEN a long time since Bob Dylan released two consecutive albums of top-drawer original material - probably as far back as 1975's Blood On The Tracks and Desire (1976), if we're being honest. But Love and Theft bridges that quarter century gap with an ease and assurance that belies his years, a more than adequate companion to Time Out Of Mind, the Grammy-winning, million-selling album which re-established him as a vital creative (and commercial) force in contemporary music.
As those who caught last year's shows would affirm, Dylan's a more potent live performer now than at anytime since the mid-'60s, with a band that's both sensitive to his needs and capable of pushing him further than he might perhaps go if left to his own devices. It's heartening, then, to see that tight unit of musicians (guitarists Charlie Sexton and Larry Compbell, bassist Tony Garnier and drummer David Kemper) getting their just desserts by accompanying him on record, an honour bestowed on few of his previous touring bands. It's a decision borne out time and time again here as they alternately add muscle to the blues riffs and sweetening to the old-tyme songs which between them make up the bulk of Love and Theft.
The most striking thing about the album on first hearing, is Bob's singing which possesses a ragged, almost sinister authority on the harder blues cuts, but which on the old-tyme numbers becomes a nonchalant croon, something he's rarely tried since Nashville Skyline (and which, it must be said, better befits his current maturity). It's worth remembering, in this respect, that back in the '70s, when every big star was offered their own record label, the initial signatory to Dylan's planned Ashes & Sand label was none other than '40s throwback Leon Redbone, whose genteel reinterpretation of classic blues, swing and country material offers perhaps the closest precedent to the mood and style of Love and Theft.
There may be a steelier edge to some of the blues tracks here, but there's something very similar about the album's overall warmth and the way it fuses together the old and the new. Dylan himself has acknowledged the blues roots of these dozen songs, describing the music as "an electronic grid, the lyrics being the sub-structure that holds.it all together" - a typically gnomic utterance that only begins to make sense when you hear the kind of modern language ond concerns he pours into that electronic grid.
The opening "Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum" is typical: a fast shuffle with subtle guitar flourishes punching home each line, it offers a slick, hipster-jive take on the traditional folk nar-rative style, with its nursery-rhyme protagonists stranded way out of their depth, woven into a series of more contemporary tableaux. The relaxed, reflective "Bye And Bye" likewise employs a curiously anachronistic vernacular in which ancient seeps imperceptibly into modern, and vice-versa: "I'm scufflin' and I'm shufflin' and I'm walkin' on briars," sings Bob, "I'm not even acquainted with my own desires." The contrast between the second line's New Man-ish concerns and the ages-old mythological matters evoked by the word "briars" brings a strange tension to such a gentle croon, its spiky imagery reaching from the past to prick the singer's progress.
Love and Theft is full of this kind of juxtaposition, with lines streaking off at weird tangents to what appears to be their normal course. The slide-guitar stomp "Honest With Me", for instance, starts off as a routine blues, with Dylan "stranded in the city that never sleeps" and beset by "some of these women, they give me the creeps", but after a few minutes - shortly after the Siamese twins come to town (of course!) we learn that "when I left home, the sky split open wide", an apocalyptic image that propels the singer into a new pitch of darkness entirely.
Similar in style and mood is "Lonesome Day Blues", a great slow boogie in the vein of "Rainy Day Women", to whose loping riff Augie Meyers adds a little reggae afterbeat, creating a groove akin to Rosco Gordon's seminal "No More Doggin'". Lyrically, it's packed with devastating zingers, from the sinister promise, "I'm gonna teach peace to the conquered/ I'm gonna tame the proud", to the damning broadside, "Well, my captain he's decorated, he's well schooled and he's skilled/He's not sentimental, don't bother him at all how many of his pals that he kills."
In complete contrast, "Floater" is a gentle swing number, propelled by insistent jazz rhythm guitar as Bob uncoils another comic-natural-mystic lyric, offering parables and principles with a lightness of touch and engaging jovial humour, where at other stages of his career might have wielded a more heavy-hand didacticism.
Age has clearly brought wisdom, and with it the realisation that nobody needs another aid lecturing them sternly about their lives - and anyway, it's obviously more satisfying to Dylan's mischievous prankster side to prompt thougt through enigmatic metaphor and off-hand surrealism than finger-wagging admonition.
Not that the message is necessay blurred. The traditional banjo-blues "Highwater" possesses authentic ageless he brought to same elemental struggle in "Down In Flood", with to tambourine adding reviva1-tent intent, and explicit references to Clarksdale, Dust My Broom and The Cuckoo pinning the song's folk-blues credentials firmly to its sleeve. But listen closely and you'll hear a pungent comment on Creationism done in the comic-satiric spirit of "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", with Darwin trapped out on Highway 5, hunted by the High Sheriff.
These are just a few highlights from an album virtually bereft of fluff and filler. Other tracks include a couple of croons, "Moonlight" and "Po' ", respectively light-hearted and world-weary; "Summer Days", a T-Bone Walker-style fast blues shuffle which finds Bob boasting "I got eight carburettors, and boys I'm gonna use 'em all"; another twitchy blues reminiscent of early Taj Mahal or Ry Cooder, "Cry Awhile", notable for the way the band steps heavily on the early part of the verses before easing off for their resolution and Mississippi, a song which originally appeared, in more anthemic form, on Sheryl Crow's last LP, but is offered here as a mournful reflection.
The album concludes with Dylan ruminating again on woman trouble in "Sugar Baby", where mild accordion and glistening guitar support another quotable aphorism from one of his most quotable albums: "You've always got to be prepared/But you never know for what".
Love and Theft being, I suppose, a case in point.
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