Album Review: Bob Dylan - Rough and Rowdy Ways

Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar); Charlie Sexton (guitar); Bob Britt (guitar); Donnie Herron (steel guitar, violin, accordion); Tony Garnier (bass); Matt Chamberlain (drums).

When a 19-year old Bob Dylan arrived in New York in the freezing January of 1961, he headed straight for the coffee houses in Greenwich Village where anyone could play some songs and collect a few dollars by passing a hat around at the end of their set.  However, he quickly graduated to the more organised folk clubs like The Gaslight and Gerde's Folk City as performers were booked in advance and paid a fee.

At the time Greenwich Village was awash with clubs of all kinds, some specialising in folk or blues or jazz but many happy to present all kinds of music, as well as poetry and comedy entertainers. As Dylan was leading a somewhat bohemian life at the time, crashing on the floors of patient friends' apartments, he spent the days and nights visiting most of these clubs at one time or another and immersing himself in all kinds of music. 



Sadly, this idea of clubs that are willing to present a diverse range of music has more or less faded away. Although the upstairs room in The Bridge in Newcastle, which has hosted many splendid jazz sessions for quite a while, is also the location of the Bridge Folk Club an institution that has been running for over 60 years and is the second oldest folk club in the UK. As far as I know only my Bebop Spoken Here reviewing colleague AA and myself are likely to be found at both sessions from time to time.

In his engaging and imaginative autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan talks about many of these clubs and it is interesting to see how folk and jazz intersected at the time. He mentions one coffeehouse where Cecil Taylor used to play and says that one time he and Taylor played The Water is Wide together. He also says he played there with Billy Higgins and Don Cherry.

In another anecdote from the book Dylan records that one afternoon he dropped into the Blue Note on 3rd Street and found Thelonious Monk there on his own at the piano. He told him that he played folk music in a club up the street to which Monk's replied, "We all play folk music". Dylan also says that Monk's tune Ruby, My Dear had a particular influence on his songwriting (I wonder if the mood and feeling of Girl From the North Country was one possible result).

Therefore, as previously noted on BSH. it is not really that surprising to find that Dylan mentions many jazz tunes and musicians in the lyrics of the final track on his latest album Rough and Rowdy Ways. The 17-minute epic, Murder Most Foul, takes the assassination of President Kennedy as a starting point for exploring the social and culture milieu of that time. In typically Dylanesque fashion this track was actually released three months before the album.

Now that the complete CD is available, it is clear that the whole album is saturated in songs and musical references to folk tunes, blues, American standards. rock, popular music from the radio and also a touch of classical. For good measure the tracks reference as well the American civil war, dead US presidents (usually assassinated), Shakespeare and literature of all kinds, Greek and Roman history and mythology, various religions and an obscure Irish village. In many ways Rough and Rowdy Ways is a musical version of Chronicles.

And the musical styles are as varied as the lyrics. Slow blues False Prophet, R'n'B rockers Goodbye Jimmy Reed, romantic ballads I've Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You, traditional folk songs Mother of Muses, Hammer-horror musically tinged tracks My Own Version of You and epic poetry-style recitations Murder Most Foul. Both lyrically and musically, as he sings on the album, he is using "all of his powers".

In a recent interview for the Martin Scorsese ‘documentary’ on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue Dylan said, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”. Dylan has, of course, been famous for recreating himself and his musical personas throughout his career and this album is another multi-layered re-creation based on a lifetime of ideas and influences.

Even more than his other albums, many of the songs are also reflections on the artistic process. Dylan is often slippery in his use of pronouns so in the lyrics and music of My Own Version of You it is hard to be certain whom the first and second person pronouns refer to, "I’ll bring someone to life, is what I wanna do / I’m gonna create my own version of you”.

Again in the following track I’ve made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You it’s an open question whether he is talking about a particular person, his fans, himself or his muse, “Been thinking it all over and I’ve thought it all through / I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you”.

The image of a river is a recurrent theme on the album with Dylan suggesting he is part of musical traditions that go back to some timeless source, flows through the present into a distant and yet uncreated future, "My heart's like a river, a river that sings / Just takes me a while to realise things".

Most of us would regard reaching our eightieth year as a good achievement in itself (congratulations to those who have already done so) never mind releasing a thirty-third album of original material. In terms of his creativity in re-inventing himself and his art Dylan is up there with Miles Davis and Picasso and this album is another superb illustration of that. In its own way as good as anything he has done.

JC