Bob Dylan at 75

Photo: John Shearer (for Columbia Records)

(This is an updated version of an essay I wrote five years ago on the occasion of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday).

Bob Dylan turns 75 today (May 24) – 55 years and a few months after he first arrived in New York City with a repertoire of folksongs learned from Odetta and Woody Guthrie records.

Within a relatively short time, Dylan was one of the premier folk artists in Greenwich Village and was well on his way to becoming, arguably, but certainly in my opinion, the most important and influential songwriter ever.

I’m reminded now of something the young Dylan said.

In 1963, talking to Nat Hentoff for the liner notes to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan about his ability to pull off a song as difficult as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Dylan said, “It's a hard song to sing. I can sing it sometimes, but I ain't that good yet. I don't carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people.”

Dylan was all of 21 years old when he made that statement. Woody Guthrie – hospitalized with the Huntington’s disease that would kill him in 1967 – and Lightnin’ Hopkins were both then around 50. Big Joe Williams was about 60 and Lead Belly had died in 1949 at 61.

Dylan now is significantly older than Williams, Guthrie and Hopkins were then – and older than Lead Belly was when he died. The young Dylan was highly influenced by those legendary artists who had come along decades earlier – his own influence would soon surpass all others. He changed what was possible to do in the context of a song.

And, yes, he does carry himself with all of the musical gravitas that Williams, Guthrie, Lead Belly and Hopkins had then.

Dylan’s music has been part of my life for most of my life. I bought Dylan’s first few LPs in 1967 when I was 13 and have listened intently to everything he’s released over the past 50 years (and a fair bit of what’s never been released). I’ve seen him in concert a bunch of times and I’ve read most of the good books (including his own Chronicles Volume One), and maybe a few too many of the bad books, that have been written about Dylan over the years.

I was even introduced to him once – in 1975 – for about half a second. “Pleased to meet ya,” he said. I was 21, he was 34, ages that now seem so young.

I’ve written about a bunch of Dylan albums and books over the years in newspapers and magazines (and here on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches blog), I’ve produced and hosted a bunch of radio specials on him and his songs, but I don’t know Dylan. He is easily the most enigmatic, the most unknowable, person I’ve ever encountered.

As I noted in my book review of Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz in a 2011 issue of Sing Out! magazine, I’ve long thought that one of the reasons I so appreciate so much of Bob Dylan’s oeuvre is that (I think) we’ve listened to so much of the same music. To the traditional folk and blues songs, and to so many of the musicians who played them. When Dylan sang, “no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell,” I knew what he was talking about because I’ve listened to all those old Blind Willie McTell records. When he borrows lines or settings from Woody Guthrie or Lead Belly or others, I know where they come from. Dylan’s music is rooted ever so strongly in what Greil Marcus termed the “old weird America,” the folk music and the folk-rooted blues and country music that developed in particular regional locations and began to spread everywhere in the first half of the 20th century.

This leads me to the point I wanted to make when I started writing this little essay. Even before Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, there have been commentators who’ve said that Dylan left folk music behind. I don’t think that’s at all true. To this day, Dylan’s songwriting continues to be rooted in the “old weird America.” Dylan didn’t leave folk music behind when he embraced rock ‘n’ roll, he changed what was possible in a folk music context; both in how it’s played and how it’s expressed. I hear folk music at the heart of so much of Dylan’s songwriting -- from his earliest work to his most recent.

And anyone who thinks that folk music is necessarily defined by acoustic guitars does not understand folk music.

Even Dylan’s two recent albums celebrating the Great American Songbook, in my opinion, are less a homage to Frank Sinatra, than they are a recognition that those classic songs somehow form part of that “old weird America.” It’s not so much the circumstances of how and when they were written as the context in which they are interpreted.

When jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie developed bebop, they weren’t leaving jazz behind, they were changing it; even though some of the traditional jazz greats like Louis Armstrong were slow to accept or understand what Parker and Gillespie were doing. Just like some in the folk establishment of 1965 were slow to accept and understand what Dylan was doing. Bob Dylan changed folk music in much the same way Charlie Parker changed jazz.

As far as I’m concerned, Dylan playing his folk-rooted songs with rock musicians in his time is not very different from the Weavers playing folksongs with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra in theirs.

Anyway, real rock ‘n’ roll, is a folk-rooted form. Just listen to the Sun-era recordings of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash or Jerry Lee Lewis. Listen to Wanda Jackson’s 1950s records, listen to Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley or Little Richard. The folk and blues roots are there in that music.

By the way, Louis Armstrong was a folksinger, too.

Happy Birthday, Bob!

(For folks in Montreal: there are Bob Dylan birthday celebrations  tonight at Club Soda and Cafe Mariposa.)

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---Mike Regenstreif

Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl – Forty

MASON DARING AND JEANIE STAHL

Forty

Daring Records

daringandstahl.com

“What a surprise, that after a few decades, we would record another album,” write Mason Daring and Jeanie Stahl in the liner notes to Forty, an album that celebrates the four decades since they first worked together as a duo – and their first new recordings as a duo in well over three decades,

And how nice it is to hear this new music from old friends. Back in the late-1970s, I operated an independent booking agency for a few years and Mason and Jeanie were among the artists I worked with. They were among the top performers in the bustling New England folk scene back then and I started working with them on the strength of a great LP called Sweet Melodies in the Night that included several classics like Mason’s “Marblehead Morning,” Jeanie’s beautiful title song and definitive interpretations of songs by Bill Staines and Robin Batteau. During the time I worked with them they recorded a second great LP called Heartbreak. Years later, many of the songs from those LPs were collected on a CD called The Early Years, and now, decades after that, we have Forty.

By the time I wound down my agency, Mason was heavily into scoring films – notably for director John Sayles – and Jeanie went on to record several solo albums. While both have pursued other primary interests over the past three decades-plus, they have continued to get together to perform on occasion.

All this time later, Mason and Jeanie still sound great together on Forty’s 10 songs – half of them originals, half of them classics drawn from contemporary folk music, country, western swing and the Great American Songbook. Jeanie’s voice remains exquisite while Mason’s glides effortlessly on pieces like Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”

There’s a timelessness to the songs on the album and originals like Mason’s “Too Much” and Jeanie’s “The Ring” stand tall next to the classics.

And while Forty is a delightful listen from start to finish, I’ll pick out a few of my very favorite tracks.

“The Ring,” is a lovely song which uses the metaphor of a 40-year-old ring in a jewel box for the seemingly quick passage of time that those of us of a certain age can now look back on. It also captures that passage of time celebrated with this album.

“It’s Funny,” written and sung by Mason, is a cool, love comes-love goes tune that would have been at home on a Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett LP, while their versions of “San Antonio Rose” and Chattanooga Choo Choo,” – both of which I’m sure I remember Mason and Jeanie playing live back in the day – are full of playful swing.

Perhaps my favorite track, though, is Jeanie’s sublime interpretation of “Across the Great Divide,” a beautiful song written by my late friend Kate Wolf. Perfection.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Bob Dylan – Shadows in the Night

BOB DYLAN

Shadows in the Night

Columbia

bobdylan.com

I was skeptical last year when the news surfaced that Bob Dylan was recording an album of songs associated with Frank Sinatra. But listening and re-listening to Shadows in the Night over the past few days, I was captivated by Dylan’s 10-song, 35-minute excursion into the Great American Songbook.

Although each of these songs may have been sung by Sinatra at one point – and he’s listed as a co-writer on “I’m a Fool to Want You,” the opening number – and although the album title, Shadows in the Night, may be an allusion to “Strangers in the Night,” a Sinatra hit of the mid-1960s, I really don’t hear the album as a Sinatra tribute.

For one thing, Dylan does none of Sinatra’s major hits. There are no versions of “Strangers in the Night,” “New York, New York,” “It was a Very Good Year,” “One for My Baby,” “My Way,” etc. on this album. I looked through my own (limited) collection of Sinatra albums and not one of these songs is there. So while I am familiar with some of them from versions by other artists as disparate as Louis Armstrong and Rufus Wainwright – I recall 20-year-old Rufus singing a beautiful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I Do” at his maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1994 – I do not have previous Sinatra associations with any of these songs.

For another, Dylan does not attempt to sound like Sinatra – how could he possibly? – and the arrangements, played by Dylan’s touring band with some occasional muted horns added to some songs, sound nothing like Sinatra’s typical big band or orchestral settings. There isn’t even a piano player on the album.

The Sinatra allusion aside, Shadows in the Night is a great title for a deeply intimate album that really should be listened to late at night. The songs are mature reflections sung quietly in Dylan’s ragged, yet compelling voice. He makes these songs his own in ways that are very different from how Sinatra – or other voices like Tony Bennett or Ella Fitzgerald – might have approached them.

The key song, for me anyway, is “Why Try to Change Me Now?” one of the more obscure songs I’d never heard before. Written by Joseph McCarthy Jr. and Cy Coleman, it’s lyrics could credibly have been written by Dylan about himself. “So, let people wonder, let ‘em laugh, let ‘em frown/You know I’ll love you till the moon’s upside down/Don’t you remember I was always your clown?/Why try to change me now?” he sings on top of a quietly lovely guitar-and-pedal-steel-based arrangement.

Among my other favorites are the weary-voiced renditions of “Autumn Leaves” and “That Lucky Old Sun,” both songs I’ve heard by many other artists, and Berlin’s “What I’ll Do,” a beautiful, lonely song.

Many of these are songs of regret – regrets borne of maturity and experience – and Dylan’s voice, ragged from the decades but somehow sweeter than it’s ever been, and as compelling as it’s ever been, draws me deeply into the songs. And I love the way he’s re-imagined the songs for subdued, arrangements built around guitars, pedal steel and bass.

This is not an album that Dylan – who revolutionized the art of songwriting in the 1960s when he was in his 20s – could have made back then. But it is something I’m glad he surprised us with in his 70s.

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--Mike Regenstreif