Notes on "Love and Theft"

Notes on Dylan's "Love and Theft"                                                        

So typical of the way the best music works—as a lifelong Dylan fan, I'd heard everything about this album, formed a few guesses of my own, and of course when I got my hands on the actual release, it sounded like something completely different than I had expected: Something completely new, and yet as old as the hills. It doesn't sound like any other album he's ever done. That he is still capable of pulling off that trick is what makes him so amazing.

The album title comes from a 1993 book on the history of the American minstrel movement. And in that respect, the songs are filled with pranks, puns, and more funny shit than any other Dylan album to date. And musicianship to spare. These are musicians Dylan has played hundreds of concerts with.

The first question, at least in the second half of his career, has always been the same: What does he sound like? What shape is his voice in? What tone and style is he using this time? His voice is now shot, and that's a good thing. No more froggy in-between. Critic Rob Sheffield, writing in Rolling Stone, calls it a continuation of "the sinister rusted-muffler growl he introduced on Time Out of Mind." Still, "Love and Theft is in many ways a riskier, looser and more profoundly strange album that Time Out of Mind." In the end, Sheffield sums it up as "a full-blown tour of American song in all its burlesque splendor."

Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum" sets the tone and limns the territory: High weirdness under cover of nursery rhymes, tall tales, and old carny cons. Quietly ringing guitars behind him, all edgy and discreet. Comes complete with bongos. (Dylan produced the album himself, as "Jack Frost"). Over the years, Dylan has steadfastly maintained that he works in the "burlesque area" rather than in any arena of high art. One of the things he means by this, I think, is that nothing is out of bounds, stylistically. "Love and Theft" is such a seamless amalgam of rock, blues, Tin Pan Alley, rhythm and blues, ragtime, minstrel, cocktail music, country—at the age of 60, writes Sheffield, Dylan is playing "the kind of rockabilly he must have bashed out with his high school band more than forty years ago."

Mississippi is a leftover ballad of scorched love from the Time Out of Mind sessions with Daniel Lanois. I Dylan decided to hang onto that one, and do it simply, after Lanois failed to convince him to layer it with New Orleans swamp funk. I think Bob was right this time. "You can always come back," he croons, "but you can't come back all the way."

Summer Days is all rockabilly smiles, a rave-up like something the Stray Cats might have covered. Remember, it wasn't Odetta and Woody Guthrie that got Dylan started--it was Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, Elvis, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly. And since it's Bob's own rockabilly, you can never guess, you can never predict, what the next line will bring. Ever.

 Bye and Bye is pure Tin Pan Alley Pop, easy listening and romantic, something Sinatra could have sung. But the way Bob sings it, he should have a tip jar on the floor by his chair. Dylan, by the way, was an early and ardent supporter of Leon Redbone ("I can't get enough of the guy"), and it shows here.

Lonesome Day Blues comes at you like some smarter, warmer outtake from Blonde on Blonde. Incredible. I hope he's taking his Viagra--music like this could get a guy laid.

 Yeah the road's washed out

The weather's not fit for man nor beast

 Funny the things you have the hardest time partin' with  

 Are the things you need the least.

Floater is another crooner's tune. It sounds like nostalgia, and it is—but it is also some form of primal American music we haven't heard since Big Pink and the Basement Tapes. Dylan is creating music that sounds like he learned it off an old Victrola. And those lyrics, twisting and turning in sly and unexpected ways. This is a very sly album of songs.

High Water continues the mature extension of the Basement Tapes. It is the lynchpin of the album, I think. This is "Down in the Flood" resurrected and re-visioned. I hate banjos, but the banjo here is so spooky it raises the hair on my neck when it apes "Pretty Polly."  I get the feeling, listening to him sing "It's tough out there/High water everywhere," that in a sense, this is really where Dylan was headed all along. Some kind of reckoning is taking place here; some kind of summing up, spoken in the ageless tongue of American vernacular music.

Moonlight belongs to the category of what used to be called "standards."  Bob's not afraid to show us how much he really knows about the music of this nation's past. It's Bob's version of "Just A Gigolo."

Honest With Me is as close to rock and roll as Bob gets, with a high lonesome Charlie Sexton guitar figure pushing it forward from behind. I was a fan of a band called the Arc Angels, which put out only one album, with Charlie Sexton and a bunch of Austin rockers. Dylan, asked once if he played rock and roll, replied, "only in spirit."

 My woman got a face like a teddy bear

 She's tossin' a baseball bat in the air

And the singer exhorts her:  "You don't understand my feelings for you/You'd be honest with me if only you knew."

Po' Boy, by contrast, is pure vaudeville, pure Burlesque—except for the uncertain landscape the singer is describing—complete with sly winks and broken-rhythm couplets while Bob laughs at his own knock-knock jokes. One of the strangest songs Dylan has ever written.

Cry a While sounds like another Blonde on Blonde tail dragger, with the singer crying crocodile tears over the top of tricky beer-barrel rhythms and delta slide guitars. Dylan has finally caught up with his own voice. He sounds, well, right. It's fruitless to criticize his singing now—it's Howlin' Wolf crossed with Hoagy Carmichael. It's weathered and knowing. ("I'm lettin' the cat out of the cage/I'm keepin' a low profile.")

Sugar Baby, finally, is some kind of Dylan masterpiece that, at first, is hard to find a way into, but which soon opens up to reveal itself as one of those Dylan epics without precedent, like "Visions of Johanna", or "Idiot Wind," or, more recently, "Highlands." Rueful. Listen to how he sings "look up, look up."

This collection belongs on the shelf with John Wesley Harding, The Basement Tapes, and Time Out of Mind; albums that repay as many listenings as your care to give them.

After dozens of albums, Dylan once again manages to put out a release that sounds like nothing that has ever gone before it, by Bob or anyone else. A true American treasure.