Some Songs Considered

“No Surrender” – Bruce Springsteen
(Words/music: Bruce Springsteen, available on Born in the U.S.A., Columbia 1984)

This statement would probably make Bruce Springsteen’s day: I’ve largely explored Springsteen’s catalog the same way I’ve explored Bob Dylan’s output.  My most concentrated listening to both Springsteen and Dylan occurs when I want to hear a certain song, which then points me toward an entire album.  For instance, cravings for “Tangled Up in Blue” lead to an hour with Blood on the Tracks, or the desire to hear the “Meeting Across the River / Jungleland” sequence leads to an immediate play of Born to Run.  If their catalogs are a diverse, highly regarded restaurant menu, I tend to order the same dishes even though I’m confident I’ll like a lot more than what I’ve already tried.  With these records, it leads to the dual sense of embarrassment and excitement of making a late discovery.  I might feel foolish for only coming around to Blonde on Blonde recently, but it also means that it’s a new, exciting record to digest.

This is my experience with “No Surrender” a couple years ago.  Simply put, it never registered on my radar, as I spent far more time in other parts of Springsteen’s catalog.  It most likely caught my attention when I wanted to hear “I’m On Fire” and I let the album continue playing.  The driving rhythm and the quick yet effortless way Springsteen tosses off each line hooked me more than the words, but there’s still a part of me that completely understands the “we learned more from a three-minute record, baby / than we ever did in school” line.  Tonight, I’m keying in on the way Springsteen rhymes at the end of his lines – sometimes it’s every other line, sometimes it’s consecutive lines, and sometimes it’s three out of four lines rhyming.  It’s the type of rhyme that doesn’t call attention to itself.  Instead, these rhymes help link these lines together and, in a strange way, make them feel like they move even quicker.  In the context of an album with an extremely dated sound, “No Surrender” manages to convey its urgent tone and driving feel beneath the booming production.  I’ll probably keep listening to it on a semi-regular basis until I get the urge to order off a different part of the menu.  

More on Bruce Springsteen: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Masters of War” – Bob Dylan
(Words/music: Bob Dylan, available on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, Columbia 1963) 

These days, I rarely think of Bob Dylan’s voice when I listen to his music.  It’s part of the entire package; it generally doesn’t add or detract to my appreciation of his songs.  “Masters of War” may be the exception, as Dylan’s voice suits the song’s tone perfectly.  His gravelly vocals help keep him reserved enough for the song.  Where a more boisterous vocalist might overwhelm the words with a powerful performance, Dylan’s comfortable range underplays the song’s intensity, making the most striking moments more powerful.  He lets his contempt come through the imagery in his words rather than the power of his voice. 

Additionally, Dylan gives the song a natural rolling motion, giving the melody peaks and valleys as the verses roll on.  As the notes climb higher, his voice naturally accents those specific lyrics.  Appropriately, Dylan stacks some of the more resonant words on these higher notes – “casket” right around the four-minute mark stands out in particular as one where Dylan’s voice naturally accentuates a lyric.  The cycle up and down the melody fits in with the repetitive strumming pattern, giving the song a circular feeling as Dylan slowly unravels the “masters” by calling them out into the open.

More on Bob Dylan: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” – Mike Ness
(Words/music: Bob Dylan, available on Cheating at Solitaire, Time Bomb / Epitaph 1999)

We’re very quick to declare sacrilege when discussing music, but we forget that we all started somewhere.  I try my best not to get angry about ignorance (now ignorance that tries to pass itself off as wisdom, that’s another story) when talking about music, but it’s hard not to think of Jack Black in that scene in High Fidelity where he’s laying into a customer for gaps in his record collection (“that is perverse – don’t tell anyone you don’t own fucking Blonde on Blonde”).  Still, I remember times as a teenager eager to explore the entire history of recorded music and not knowing where to start.  Thus, a familiar scenario: I knew who Bob Dylan was, I knew a few of his songs from the radio, but I didn’t own a Bob Dylan album.  It’s hard to imagine this in the instant gratification internet age, where almost any song is a Youtube link or Bit Torrent download away, but I felt kind of overwhelmed and didn’t really know where to start.  Sure, Allmusic was an incredible resource, but I still couldn’t find an album worth putting down $15 of money from watching my neighbors or squirreled away from a holiday.  With plenty of other records in my expanding catalog, I let Dylan fall through the cracks.

I can summarize my early years as a music fan fairly well by noting that Social Distortion was on my radar more than Bob Dylan.  When Mike Ness covered “Don’t Think Twice” on his solo album, it was one of the first times I came across one of the non-classic rock radio Dylan songs.  Naturally, I took to it almost immediately – it’s an excellent song and even to this day (I rediscovered Cheating at Solitaire a little while ago and immediately went to this track) Ness’ take on it makes sense.  He turns Dylan’s subdued fingerpicking into a rockabilly romp, but it still stays true to the seething undercurrent in Dylan’s song – one where he wants an amicable split yet the wounds still feel a little too fresh.  Maybe because this was my first experience of falling in love with a Bob Dylan song, I’m naturally drawn to the more pointed pieces in his catalog (“Positively 4th Street” perhaps being my favorite), and until tonight I never really considered Ness’ cover the reason why.  At least it’s a fairly tangible thread in his catalog (especially after he “went electric”), and even if it took me a little while to come around to all of the different sides of his personality, I had to start somewhere.  Without Mike Ness’ album, it would have happened a lot later.

More on Mike Ness: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“It Ain’t Me, Babe”– Bob Dylan and Joan Baez
(Words/music: Bob Dylan, available on The Bootleg Series, Volume 6: Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall, Columbia Records 2004)

I don’t know as much about Bob Dylan as I should, and while I could beat myself up about this gap in my knowledge of music, I look at it as a gradual discovery of these songs.  As I go deeper into Dylan’s catalog, I see all of the different aspects of his personality.  Maybe because I started exploring his songs in my early twenties, I’ve always found the young, slightly angry Dylan the most compelling.  Maybe it was borne out of understanding all of the absurd “new Dylan” talk that gets tossed around, but I find Dylan’s more pointed songs the most interesting.  These songs, like “Positively 4ht Street” or “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” find Dylan somewhat resentful of the spotlight.  After a series of brilliant songs full of youthful optimism, Dylan became a “reluctant spokesperson” for his generation.  Later on, we turned this Dylan into an archetype for any young, disaffected artist that reacts to a spotlight like a deer staring into headlights.  Whenever we do this and evoke Dylan’s name with someone like Conor Oberst or Elliott Smith, we usually cut to something like “Blowin’ in the Wind” rather than “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”  Sure, “new Dylan” is shorthand for a singer who is young, socially conscious, at least moderately literate, and has folk leanings, but it usually draws comparisons to the wrong Dylan.  Many of the songs on Bright Eyes’ Fever and Mirrors or Lifted… albums have more in common with the resentment in the post-electric era rather than the rallying cries in Dylan’s Greenwich Village days.

I’m writing about Bob Dylan tonight because it’s the closest I’m coming to a Fathers’ Day post.  My dad never really played a lot of music around the house but a couple times referred to a time where he skipped swimming practice in high school to go see Bob Dylan perform with some friends.  I’ve selected the version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” from a 1964 bootleg because I’d like to think that would be what he saw that night he skipped out on practice (minus Joan Baez, I’d imagine).  Even if my dad didn’t pass down records from his youth the way others might (and if I ever have children, the way I probably will innately), he’s always been incredibly supportive of my various musical endeavors.  I remember he bought me my first drum set and drove nearly forty minutes away to go buy it.  He always read my music articles and listened to my radio show (when the internet stream was available) even if he rarely knew (or liked, I imagined) and of the bands.  Most importantly, my dad taught me the merits of perseverance.  He would sing the praises of hard work and consistency when he needed to, but he taught these lessons every day by example.  He’s a living, breathing example of someone who aims to be better every day and approaches it in small, manageable doses.  He’s given my brothers and me encouragement to follow our passions, the resources to be successful, and the space to fail.  From a young age, my parents both taught me to follow the path I wanted to follow, and there’s no way I could spend (at this point) nearly six months of my life trying to learn a little more about music and a lot more about being a better writer without either of them.  So I’m sharing a Bob Dylan post today in part because of my dad’s story, but in part because the way that many idolize Dylan is the way that I idolize my father.  Just as there will never be a “new Dylan,” I don’t want to be a clone of my dad.  Instead, my pursuit to be a damn good version of myself is a tribute to the way that he (and my mom) raised me.

More on Bob Dylan: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm