2006: Modern Times - Bob Dylan
Looking back at 30 years of music | Bob Dylan, My Chemical Romance, Paolo Nutini, Amy Winehouse, Taylor Swift
Like most people, my first encounter with Bob Dylan was with his 1960’s work. I was about 10 years old when my uncle first played me Bringing It All Back Home, and in doing so, forever changed my musical landscape.
Like so many others, hearing Dylan for the first time was like hearing a Siren song. I didn’t know just how deeply I was about to be pulled under the current of his artistry, and how much of the rest of my life would be changed by hearing that record for the first time. Being a fan of his music has led me all over the world - I have seen him in concert in London, Rome, New York, Tokyo, Memphis, Paris, Orlando, Dublin and plenty of other places - and led me to discover so many more artists, books and films that I would have either missed out on or come to so much later without him.
After the initial introduction, again like everyone else who falls hard for Dylan’s music, I feasted and gorged on every release I could get my hands on. My uncle had a few in his collection; The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Self Portrait, New Morning. Each one so different from the last, each one a new riddle to be solved and each one filled with new wonders to be uncovered.
I endlessly watched and re-watched The Other Side of the Mirror, tracking Dylan’s Newport Folk Festival appearances from 1963, 64 and 65 and obsessing over this youthful singer who was warning of such horrors with a weight and levity and gravitas far beyond his age. In front of my eyes and a million years ago, he morphed into a hipper-than-hip Beatnik poet by 65, and for the first time looked shaken to his core while singing It’s All Over Now Baby Blue after the last boos rang out, louder than even Mike Bloomfield’s electric and electrifying guitar.
But both The Other Side of the Mirror and Don’t Look Back felt like watching an artefact from so long ago. Both shot in black and white, they feel even older than they are. Like so much of the music that I loved so early on, Elvis and Sinatra or Millie Jackson, or Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan felt entirely of another lifetime. Entirely of another era.
At ten and eleven years old, it didn’t even cross my mind that Bob Dylan might still be an active, important or vital creative artist.
So it was with some surprise that I saw him in an advert for Apple’s latest iPod and, more importantly and excitingly, advertising his latest album, Modern Times - the first one that he would release since I had become a fan.
In the 30 second commercial, he looked ancient. He sounded even older. Up to that point I thought the height of cool was Dylan’s snarling, snotty Don’t Look Back get up but here he was studded with diamonds and decked in a black cowboy hat, a pencil ‘tach atop his pouting lips and sounding better than I’d ever seen him. He was mythical here. Magnetic. There were only 30 seconds of music in the clip but they sounded grittier, more raw and more lived-in than anything I’d heard from him up to that point.
When it came out, I picked up my copy of Dylan’s new release on CD from the Virgin Megastore in Times Square and practically wore it out. I spent our whole holiday exploring the city with the sounds of Modern Times ringing in my ears; when walking in Greenwich Village where the Troubadour had first made his mark on New York and the folk scene, passing through Chelsea and its famous hotel, in Central Park and Times Square and in Hell’s Kitchen, where Alicia Keys was born while Dylan was living down the line.
Dylan had come a long way since those 60’s records I had been so obsessed with. He’d been a lot of people since their release and lived a lot of lives in the 40 years since. His voice had been beaten up and busted down and roughed out around the edges, but this record is not all that different to Bringing It All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited either thematically or stylistically. It’s more mature, sure, but it’s his 65-year old-man update on those albums he made way back in ‘65.
Like those earlier albums, this one is packed full of poetry (mostly his own, but also including a few lines borrowed from Civil War poet Henry Timrod, and even older than that, the ancient epic poems of Homer and Virgil) and built up on blues and pre-rock traditions. It’s full of history, social commentary and romance; full of lust and danger. It bursts into life, walks a hard road of doom and destruction, but Dylan himself is only passing through, documenting the ruins. With his band, he plays a driving lick and breakneck beat at the end of the world, at the last outback, detached from it all and ready to get back on the road.
This is a ruggedly beautiful record. In amongst the upbeat and uptempo numbers like the cocksure and swaggering Thunder on the Mountain or Someday Baby are some of Dylan’s most devastating stories, lyrics and deliveries.
Spirit on the Water is a delight in romantic poetry, underscored by an insistent and idiosyncratic piano line from Dylan, full of deft and expertly timed guitar licks from Denny Freeman and Stu Kimball and finished with a fine harmonica flourish. When the Deal Goes Down is an understated triumph, a latter day I’ll Remember You or Every Grain of Sand lyrically, and vocally a precursor to Dylan’s unlikely upcoming crooner period.
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's saying it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down
In Workingman’s Blues #2, each breathtaking line builds on and out-does the last, coming together to create an overwhelming centrepiece for the album. One of Dylan’s great modern day achievements, the song is an overwhelming experience; cuts right to the bone and was yet somehow improved upon in later live versions with an almost entire lyric re-write, one of the most drastic revisions he ever made in his career (for my money, the updated Workingman’s Blues #2 is among his greatest ever lyrical work).
Another towering achievement on the record is Nettie Moore. The title and refrain are both inspired by the James Lord Pierpont and Marshall S. Pike’s 1857 composition Gentle Nettie Moore, but the song is pure Modern Dylan (“I’m the oldest son of a crazy man, I’m in a cowboy band”). A quietly powerful story-song built around a recurring guitar figure and steady marching beat from George Receli’s bass-drum, Dylan talk-sings his way through this emotional old-world tale. It’s like a steady march through all time, at times it has the Civil War in the air, at times it feels like it deals with more contemporary issues.
Almost ten years before, on Time Out of Mind, Dylan sang that “it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”. Here on Nettie Moore that darkness has finally rolled in and taken hold.
Oh, I miss you, Nettie Moore
And my happiness is over
Winter's gone and the river's on the rise
I loved you then, and ever shall
But there's no one left here to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
We often talk about Dylan as a folk artist, and he is steeped in folk tradition, but he is as much a blues singer as anything, and on Modern Times he was clearly inspired by blues greats Muddy Waters, Memphis Minnie, Hambone Willie Newbern and Willie Dixon, among others. He uses floating blues verses as starting points before adding his own twists and turns on them, or alternately borrows whole lines, ideas or arrangements.
By this point in his career, Dylan’s place in history alongside all the folk and blues legends, as well as the literary giants, that inspire and inform his work was assured and untouchable.
That never stopped him from continuing to build on his legacy, though, and he did all that and more with Modern Times. A perfectly balanced album; equal parts raucous barrelhouse-rock as touching, soul-bearing and heart-stopping balladry. It is both barnstorming and apocalyptic, tender and comforting. A true mix of blues, rock, gospel, rockabilly, folk and roots traditions, Dylan pulls all the greatest aspects of old American music together into his own Modern Times.
You think he’s over the hill? Think he’s past his prime?
Not on this evidence.
Elsewhere in 2006
My Chemical Romance marched back onto the scene with their much anticipated and celebrated record The Black Parade.
An ambitious rock-opera, the album opens with The End and features some of their most well known and beloved songs in I Don’t Love You, Mama and Teenagers. The almost-titular track, Welcome to the Black Parade, is instantly recognisable from just a singular strike of the G note on the piano. Lasting just a little over 5 minutes, the song is built up of three distinct movements - not dissimilar to Wings’ Band on the Run or Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in its scope and ambition - each more thrilling, and breathless than the last.
Amy Winehouse followed up her debut album Frank with the era-defining and iconic Back to Black. Produced and (mostly) written by Mark Ronson, the album is a slick combination of rhythm, blues and reggae but it is Winehouse’s soulful voice that steals the show every time. Featuring the songs Rehab, You Know I’m No Good, Me & Mr Jones, Back to Black, Love is a Losing Game and Tears Dry on their Own, the album was an instant-classic and a remarkable artefact with which to remember one of our greatest and most tragic contemporary talents by.
Another young, soul-inspired talent making his name in 2006 was Paolo Nutini, who released his debut album These Streets in July. These Streets is not a perfect album, but it has enough on it to signal that Nutini would soon emerge as a major talent.
Some songs feel more fully realised than others, but when they do they soar. Jenny Don’t Be Hasty and New Shoes are both fun up-tempo pieces of pop-rock but it is in the supremely crafted, heart-rending lyrics and shattering vocal performances of Last Request and Rewind where Nutini shows us the depths of his soul and the outer-reaches of his voice. They are sublime and very difficult to listen to without ending up with either a catch in your throat or a tear in your eye.
Nutini may have seemed young to be co-writing and releasing such an album, but compared to another 2006 debutante he was plenty old enough. Taylor Swift had been signed by Sony/ATV at age 14 to start working on her first album, and was still only 16 when her eponymous release came out.
A purely contemporary country album, there is nothing on this release that indicates the complete global Pop takeover that was to come (although, there are moments where glimpses of future Taylor Swifts to come do break through - listening back now, you almost expect her to shift into All Too Well during Teardrops on My Guitar, such is the similarity of their style and delivery) but there is plenty to suggest she could go on to become the biggest and best of the modern country singers.
She already knows how to write a catchy hook. She is already adept at arranging, and this is a finely crafted record, full of great melodies and music. She also already has a clear way with words and, of course, she hasn’t yet been weighed down by feeling the need to constantly refer back to her own history as an artist and public figure in her songwriting.
These songs have the room to stand up by themselves as stories, to exist without the weight of expectation from her fan-base and they are all the better for not having to co-exist with all the Taylor Swift “lore” that her more recent work has to contend with. For the most part, these are her true story songs, more so even than those on her later Folklore and Evermore albums, and are, enough of the time, about characters other than herself. Maybe it is only here and the follow up record Fearless where the Taylor Swift character doesn’t overshadow the characters she conjures in her songs.
It feels quite rare now to hear her so earnest, and to hear her ready to really let herself go and have fun with her music. I really like this album, and probably enjoy it a fair bit more than a lot of what came later. She’s not quite grown into her voice yet here and at times she really does sound like a 16 year old reaching for a more mature sound than she is capable of quite yet, or putting on an accent that is not her own and doesn’t quite fit, but she is already very self-aware with her songwriting, at one point singing that “I’m just a girl, trying to find a place in this world”.
You couldn’t say she never found her place in the world, and that it turned out to be right at the top
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Notable Album Releases:
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not
Beyonce - B’Day
Gwen Stefani - The Sweet Escape
Jay-Z - Kingdom Come
Lily Allen - Alright, Still
Morrissey - Ringleader of the Tormentors
P!nk - I’m Not Dead
The Strokes - First Impressions Of Earth
Razorlight - Razorlight
Rihanna - A Girl Like Me
Wonderful writing, Matthew. You perfectly capture the combination of magisterial grace, hard-won gravitas, and impish glee on Modern Times.
You also make a keen observation about the impact of black-and-white film on the way we remember sixties Dylan. Those images and performances are so deeply ingrained that it's easy to forget that life was actually lived in color back then. As a thought experiment, try imagining Dont Look Back and The Other Side of the Mirror in color. It's hard to do, right? And you kind of don't want to.
Then there's the footage from the 1966 tour. Great music, but also the document of a man on the express train to self-destruction. Sure, it was the drugs and the hostile crowds and the exhausting pace. But on some subliminal level, as a viewer, I think I've long associated that manic, debilitating process with his move away from black and white, as if the sudden immersion in a garish life lived in color was too much. Newsflash: forget the motorcycle crash--in 1966 Dylan overdosed on color!
Beautiful piece on the great man - never has the expression "gets better with age" been more appropriate. I'm building up to a Dylan blog (coming soon!) but want to get it right!