Letter from London

One more look back at 2005 - here's a gig review from January, written in the 'Letter from...' style.

Maybe it’s the places I hang out in, but I just don’t get this idea of a ‘London sound’. The phrase gets bandied about but I have lived nearly all my life in London, I work in London, and I just can’t stretch this myth into any sort of reality. The acts that I’ve heard in London over the last few months have given me folk, country, blues, Americana, classic songwriting, rock and roll…but nothing that is specifically London.

I have read my music history. I know all about Swinging London, the King’s Road, Joanna Lumley, whatever. And around that time there were undoubtedly a lot of very British sounding bands – the Small Faces and the Who spring to mind. But of the tales from that period, the one that stands out for me was when Paul McCartney went into a fashionable London club, greeted a bunch of rock glitterati (I forget exactly who – Townshend, Marriott, Richards) and played them the Beatles’ new single, Hey Jude. His peers, so the story goes, were speechless – the Beatles had done it again. True or not, this anecdote sums up all that stuff about a London sound for me – even if there ever was one, it wasn’t that important. London is too big, it has too much to offer, for one type of music to dominate in any significant sense. It’s the same today – only more so. London is massive, cosmopolitan and culturally diverse, and that is reflected in the music on offer. London has history from every age, people from every country, and music from every instrument.

But if we simplify our geographical categorisations and comparisons, we can make things somewhat easier. Is there a British sound – distinct, if nothing else, from an American sound? There is. We have always had a particular way of taking those old blues and folk traditions and making them our own. But rather than wallowing any longer in such spatial definition, let’s get on and look at one band which quite naturally takes the American roots of rock and roll and adds that British flavour.

Amsterdam’s two (internet-only) releases to date feature a lovely blend of vocal and instrumental styles. They embrace the right punk influences – following the lead less of Oasis, who name check the Sex Pistols but sound nothing like them, and more of the newer British guitar bands, like Franz Ferdinand, which have the Clash and Elvis Costello as influences. Amsterdam’s frontman, Ian Prowse, writes the most beautiful melodies and heartfelt, personal lyrics – sometimes so personal that it is painful to listen to – Hatred is Wasted makes me want to cry and shout “Yes! That’s right!” at the same time. Add to this some decent experimental keyboards, and the basis of a good – and original – band is in place. But what really sets Amsterdam apart on the first two albums is Genevieve Mort, then the band’s other singer. Mort takes lead vocals on some songs and adding her gorgeous high tones to Prowse’s on others. For many bands, throw the combination of male and female singers, trippy keyboards, and lots of “Love one another” lyrics into the cocktail mixer and the resulting drink would be late-sixties long-haired hippy music – I am thinking Jefferson Airplane here. But Amsterdam retain their punk sensibilities and the result is unique.

Genevieve Mort is no longer in the band, and their sound is undeniably different as a result. I saw them the other day at the Barfly, one of many bad venues in Camden, and Prowse, a lively and combative musician already, has put two fingers up at the subtleties of the band’s former approach. The songs were familiar but the two-guitar attack – on paper nothing new for the band – was more vigorous, and the harmonies from Johnny Barlow, the bassist turned guitarist, gave the band a real rock drive which previously came solely just from Prowse. But hats off to them – this was another great London gig by Amsterdam. They soared higher than I've seen them before; Prowse himself seemed to be flying, his music taking him far above the dank and dingy upstairs room.

Unusually, they came on in unassuming fashion - an introduction which was a world away from the first time I saw Amsterdam, two and a half years ago, when Prowse came on punching the air like a rock star lost at a football match. This time, the travelling scouse brigade made a lot of noise, but the singer held back the triumphalism for when his music started. It’s a cliché, but he let the music do the talking.

This was a gig to promote Amsterdam’s debut single, The Journey. Many of the songs sound familiar to Amsterdam’s followers, because as Prowse made clear, they have waited a long time for this recognition. But the performance was somehow more emotional than I remember some of the other Amsterdam gigs I've seen - or was it relief that finally they are (nearly) there? I don't know, but certainly naked emotion was what we got from Does This Train Stop on Merseyside? and You're a Phoney. But this is not surprising, since between them, those two songs sum up some important aspects of Prowse’s attitude to the world. Does This Train… is a tribute to his home city, Liverpool, and if anyone thinks emotion can’t be gritty, they should listen to this song. It is immediately obvious that this is a song full of warmth for its subject; but nonetheless its images range from the depressing (“EasyJet flying in the sky”) to the disgraceful (“The blood of Africa on everyone”). You’re a Phoney, meanwhile, is even blunter and has none of the romanticism – it’s a song sung to Tony Blair. He’s let us down. He’s a phoney. Simple as that. These two songs display the honesty that helps make Prowse a really talented songwriter.

Amsterdam are not a one-man band – this is a tight unit, and each member plays a role in creating the band’s distinctive sound. It is heavy enough to be rock, but the tunes are melodic enough (and reach high enough) to sound like classic British pop as well. But what's in a definition? The Journey has that bluesy feel that marks out all authentic rock and roll – whether it is from Britain, the States or wherever. If you haven’t had the chance to catch these guys live, give The Journey a try – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Did Dylan sell out?

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at a meeting held by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, a left-wing group that a friend of mine is involved in. Here's the text of (roughly) what I said - it comes across as quite informal because I wrote it as I envisaged speaking it.

The implication of the initial question is that Bob Dylan was a committed, full-time member of the early 60s movement that we will call ‘folk protest’; and then later on he sold out, abandoning his left-wing principles in the name of making different types of music – more personal songs, a rock and roll style. Well, clearly as the 60s progressed, Dylan moved away from protest songs and made many different types of music. But far too many histories of the era take a very, well, dialectical perspective, based on two types of Dylan: one, the author of Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, and all the rest; and the other, the cool, disengaged rock and roller of the mid sixties, who dismissed his earlier songs as “finger-pointing songs”, a phrase calculated to upset the likes of us, and rejected all that they represented. But this way of looking at things rules out so many important factors – including his pre-Greenwich Village life, and the almost four decades since he played those shows with The Hawks and caused such outrage, and most importantly, the reasons for and the nature of the shift that undeniably took place. I think implicit in the question of whether Dylan sold out is another question – ‘Did Dylan buy in?’ If we can look more honestly and realistically about where Dylan was coming from in the early and mid sixties, we can make a more meaningful assessment of that ‘selling out’ era.

As a general point, I find it best not to be surprised, or too disappointed, when my musical heroes don’t agree with me politically. I have always felt that it was best not to judge my musical heroes, with left-wing tendencies, by the same standards as I would judge say, members of the same political party as me, or colleagues of mine in the trade union I work for, or people who explicitly claim to be something like a socialist, a Marxist, or whatever. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, none of them have ever claimed to be proper socialists. Bragg comes close; Earle even closer in some ways, claiming he is a borderline Marxist, but although I think he is head and shoulders above those others, politically, I am not sure he fully knows what that means. Anyway it is far better to have low political expectations of your musical heroes. Then when they do good, solid left-wing things, it’s a bonus.

A comment from Mike Davis on the blurb of Mike Marquesee’s book on Bob Dylan caught my attention. He says that Marqusee “rescues” Dylan “from the condescension of his own later cynicism”. Now, apart from being one of those smug, patronising statements that turn people away from your cause, this quote demonstrates what I am talking about. Dylan doesn’t need rescuing! Left-wing readers may need rescuing from Dylan’s later cynicism; his protest songs themselves may even need rescuing from the same thing, so that they can still be enjoyed as what they were – among the greatest left-wing protest songs ever written. But to say that Dylan himself needs rescuing is breathtakingly arrogant, because it suggests that whoever is saying it knows the mind of Dylan better than Dylan himself. Has he listened to Blood on the Tracks? Or Time Out of Mind? Or any number of Dylan’s other great albums? The rest of us struggle to understand the workings of Dylan’s mind, and so we are in no position to second-guess him, although I’m about to try. But Dylan does not need rescuing from himself.

So let’s get down to the question, or rather the two questions as I’ve interpreted it – did Bob buy in, and did he sell out. First, some basic facts, which I think these days are beyond debate.

Bob Dylan started off as a teen rock and roller with no politics or folk music in his work. He played Little Richard numbers on his piano, he rarely played the guitar, and it took a long time before he started writing songs.

Once in New York, he became part of the burgeoning folk protest movement, and in 1962 and 1963 made two albums, Freewheelin’ and The Times They Are A-Changing, which helped begin the definition of a generation. I don’t think I am engaging in hyperbole when I say that. These albums were full of acoustic protest songs which need no introduction – songs which were at once directly political and wonderfully poetic. ‘Blowin in the Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘The Lonsesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’. These songs had some effect, though it’s impossible to say how much, in galvanising and broadening the appeal of the civil rights and peace movements of the early 60s.

In the mid-sixties he left the folk scene behind, wrote songs about a variety of less political and more personal topics, and made more electric rock and blues music. Subsequently, he has made great albums in many genres – older-style folk, country, rock and roll, blues…Dylan is such a great songwriter that he transcends genre. Since the mid 60s, bar the odd political song and a flirtation with born-again Christianity, he has stayed out of politics, and these days seems comfortable performing for the Pope and selling an old live recording through Starbucks.

So far, so uncontroversial.

Now I would just like briefly to cover the argument that Dylan going electric, and all of the hoo-ha that accompanied it, was a political sell-out. Many of you will have seen the footage and read accounts of the set with the Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and his 66 tour with The Hawks. These moves were of enormous historical significance for music, but not for politics. For an acoustic folk singer, as Dylan was then seen, to go electric was a huge deal, not least because at the time he was subject to a hell of a lot of criticism. But that was because many people felt that electric meant pop. Years later, we know that serious messages can come from electrified music. From a political perspective, we shouldn’t dwell on Dylan going electric. You can sing political and non-political songs both electric or acoustic. ‘Folk’ does not mean ‘left-wing’. Before Pete Seeger ever played a guitar, people were singing folk music about their washing lines. And some great left-wing music has been recorded with electrification. So although at the time many people did equate an abandonment of acoustic music with selling out politically, it’s not a good argument. Whether he sold out is a legitimate question, but using Dylan’s switch to electric music as justification for arguing that he did so doesn’t hold up.

Before Dylan wrote and played his outright folk protest songs, he was already playing what you might call that authentic, older-styled folk music. The quintessentially American music that everyday people would play to each other around the camp-fire, in their homes in the country, in the fields – music which could be about anything; not necessarily even vaguely political. Music chronicled by Alan Lomax and Harry Smith, usually based on either blues or country. Dylan went back to this music not long after the Greenwich Village days, when he recorded the Basement Tapes with The Band in Woodstock; and he has returned to that music many times since, on record and in concert. One thing seems clear: Woody Guthrie, who was an exponent of both political and what might be called “pre-political” folk music, was an early hero of Dylan’s. Not just in terms of the politics: Dylan was attracted to Guthrie’s story-song style; his finger-picking techniques; his travelling hobo persona (to the extent that Dylan invented tales of his own travels); and his politics, which were very much for the common person, against oppression, and for a fair deal. But maybe Dylan only paid lip service to each of these aspects of Guthrie’s personality and life. The young Dylan never travelled in the same way that Guthrie did; he wasn’t satisfied with sticking to the story-song spoken blues, let alone acoustic finger-picking; and, in terms of politics, while Guthrie was a sometime member and long-time supporter of the Communist Party, who dedicated the latter half of his life to the struggle, Dylan never went anywhere near that far.

So exactly how political was Dylan?

Richard Farina, with whom Dylan lived in the early 60s, characterises the politics of Dylan at the time as feeling “the intolerability of bigoted opposition to civil rights”. Fairly bland in itself. But Farina goes on to say that Dylan found opposition to such basic rights as an absurdity, and consequently he found it easy to write songs about it. The issue was open-and-shut, and so good material for songs; especially when there were specific, horrific case studies at hand – natural topics for songs like The ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, and ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’. The nuclear bomb situation seemed similarly obvious and clear-cut to Dylan – hence Masters of War. Even then, Farina points out that it was always the music that mattered to Dylan, not the politics. Not that he didn’t believe in what he was singing about; in that sense he was very much a part of the civil rights movement, and an important one at that. But artistically speaking, the political issues were being used by the songs, not the other way round. And Dylan has always – always – been an artist over and above anything else. And just as Dylan’s songs made use of the issues, in a general sense Dylan himself made use of the folk protest movement. Fame was not an end in itself – but Dylan was wily enough to realise that without it, he would not get the opportunity to practice his art with as much freedom as he wanted.

But as I hope I have made clear, I don’t believe that the exploitation here was all one way. Dylan did believe in the politics he was singing about – as I have said, it was the very fact that he believed them so strongly that made him put them in song. And the exploitation that went on was two-way, as Dylan used the movement to a degree, and the movement used him. But one of the things that impressed me most about Martin Scorcese’s recent documentary about those years was that he wasn’t painted either as an all-out left-wing firebrand or as an unbelieving and cynical user. Cynicism may have come on later, but at the time, Dylan did go far beyond what he needed to do if he was only in it to advance his own career. And Scorcese’s film makes that point with its footage of Dylan, with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, playing songs for black sharecroppers in a field in the Deep South.

That footage was from Dylan’s trip, along with Theo Bikel and Pete Seeger, to a voter-registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi – the kind of gradualist method for improving civil rights that President Kennedy approved of. The trip in itself proved that Dylan had some sort of belief in, and commitment to, the protest movement of the time, and the footage made quite an impression on me personally. But the trip was to be a significant one in other ways too. He debuted ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, a superb song telling the story of the murder of Medgar Evers, an NAACP activist. Also at the time, Dylan had long conversations with Jim Forman, the Secretary of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and Dylan was impressed by what Forman had to say – questioning the effectiveness of the slow-moving Kennedy reforms, expressing outrage at Kennedy’s refusal to protect vote-registration workers, and favouring more direct action. Nearly all chroniclers of Dylan’s career at that time accept that Dylan, Joan Baez and the rest were an integral part of that gradual approach – basically taking up the baton from Kennedy’s inaugural address and taking it to the people. Forman and SNCC rejected their approach. And in ‘Only a Pawn’ Dylan seems to lean towards Forman’s views – the murder wasn’t simply the white murderer’s fault – “it ain’t him to blame” – he is only a pawn in their game. There was a real structural problem here which required a more dramatic approach than the non-confrontational methods favoured up to that point.

Around the same time, Dylan wrote an apology to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, for making a speech (which you may remember from the Scorcese documentary) when he accepted the group's Tom Paine award, where he compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald and attacked bald politicians for being bald, and bourgeois Negroes for wearing suits on the platform at the Great March on Washington, and “generally pissed on liberalism” as Dave Marsh puts it. But what is interesting is that his apology makes it crystal clear that his treatment of the ECLU event was not because he was rejecting left-wing politics; in actual fact, his behaviour represented a radicalisation, offering support to the Black Panther position that direct action led by black people, not white people, was the only solution to civil rights problems. The only thing he rejected was the liberal, white-led folk protest movement.

Dylan did perform at the March on Washington, despite Jim Forman discouraging attendance. But by this point his protest days were numbered. Dylan was increasingly struck by what the folk protest movement had or rather hadn’t achieved, its naivete, and as Marqusee points out, the authoritarian and hence hypocritical way in which it was run. He faced a choice: break off from the musical-political movement that had given him fame, and embrace a more direct form of political action; or, still break off from the musical-political movement that had given him fame, and retreat into himself, artistically. Either way, events, lack of progress and the influence of others had helped persuade him that a new direction was required. And this is where we go back to a point I made earlier: above all else, Bob Dylan was and is an artist. So of those two choices, with hindsight, there can have been little doubt about which he would choose. And there should be no surprise. Such complicated political feelings as he was going through at the time would not make good song material.

I’ve had a look at the discussion on the Workers’ Liberty website, and the point is made that, from 1964 onwards, after the album The Times They Are A-Changing, Dylan still wrote political songs, damning critiques of the political elite, big business, inequality, and so on. His very next album, Another Side Of, contained some of these songs – like ‘Chimes of Freedom’. And not too long afterwards he wrote ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, one his most lyrically brilliant songs, and a superb indictment of modern society. I think Mike Marqusee’s central thesis is that Dylan’s post-acoustic songs of the mid-sixties – during that run of three magnificent, magnificent, albums – were actually full of social and political comment: ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is a class-based cry of rage against wage labour; ‘It’s Alright Ma’ is a damning indictment of a hypocritical, greedy and corrupt society. And there are more examples. It is certainly true that Dylan didn’t retreat totally into himself, pulling back from any social awareness. But while we don’t have time to pick lots of songs and albums apart here, I’m not sure I’m with Marqusee all the way. It seems to me that by the mid-sixties, Dylan was taking pot-shots against all manner of people and groups. He’d sweep in, condemn someone poetically, brilliantly and concisely, then move off somewhere else. And that would be that. Just like in the past, the ideal, the opinion, served the song; not the other way around. But now he would publicly deny any politics – ok he answered hecklers with “come on man, these are all protest songs”, but they weren’t. They were commentary. As he said to folk singer Phil Ochs at the time, “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit…the only thing that’s real is inside you. Your feelings. Just look at the world you’re writing about and you’ll see you’re wasting your time. The world is, well – it’s just absurd”. You could say that while Dylan still ruled the counter-culture, he provided its apolitical, its personal direction – not its political direction. From a political perspective, the songs became increasingly less specific, less pointed, and with less purpose. He wrote for himself, and never even attempted to use them externally – and nor would he dream of licensing others to do so. One of the most memorable instructions on the 1965 album Bringing it All Back Home was this one: “don’t follow leaders”. He included himself among those leaders. He was moving away from the movement. And in many ways, from the same album, It’s Alright Ma’ sums up most of what Dylan has ever tried to get across in song. The tension between the peaceful, folky style of protest on the one hand, and the more direct and possibly violent solutions on the other hand is made clear with these lyrics:

As some warn victory, some downfall

Private reasons great or small

Can be seen in the eyes of those that call

To make all that should be killed to crawl

While others say don't hate nothing at all

Except hatred

And while presidents, advertising and various other ills of modern liberal democratic capitalistic society are condemned, Dylan constantly refers back to his individualistic outlook, and implicitly his rejection of collective action to solve the problems he’s mentioned:

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged

It's only people's games that you got to dodge

And it's alright, Ma, I can make it

And finally, he admits to the presence in his mind of what would be seen as impure and unworthy thoughts by his former folk protest comrades:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen

They'd probably put my head in a guillotine

But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only

Later on in Dylan’s career, there was the occasional direct protest song. In 1971 he released the single ‘George Jackson’, about the death in prison of the Black Panther; and more importantly, in 1975 he wrote and recorded ‘Hurricane’ – a long and detailed exposition and critique of the miscarriage of justice surrounding the boxer Reuben Carter, wrongly convicted of murder. Dylan sings with urgency, anger and conviction. But even this song reads like a tacit admission of the failure of the folk protest movement: “if you’re black, you might as well not show up on the streets”. So much for voter-registration; inequality runs a lot deeper than that, as we know. In any case, these songs were isolated instances.

So, bringing all of this together so as to answer the original questions. Did Dylan buy in? Dylan bought in to an extent. He was a part-time member of that folk protest movement – he just happened to be by a long way its best songwriter and hence an invaluable asset to it. He did far more than he needed to if his only goal had been to become famous, cynically, on the back of the movement. But as he became more involved in the movement, he came to question it, and as a result he drifted away from it. He continued to write what from most other songwriters would be called dangerously revolutionary songs, and he continued to work and perform with well-known left-wing artists – Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Joan Baez again in the 70s – but once the songs were written, that was it. He would play them live, sure, but as songs at Bob Dylan concerts, not as statements.

So did he sell out? Unless you live in the world of pigeon-holes and mass over-simplifications, then the answer has to be no. Just as he had gone into the folk protest movement both for reasons of expediency and belief, he came out of it both because he questioned where it was going and also, and moreover, because it was where his art was going. That last point is one too huge to examine here, but let us not forget that it is the central point: within two years of Another Side Of, Dylan had recorded probably the best three consecutive albums recorded by one person – Bringing it all Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. As Bruce Springsteen said in a recent interview (one which was very revealing, both musically and politically), “Trust the art, not the artist”. So did he sell out? Not really – he just moved on.

The albums of 2005

Ok, for my first proper post, here are two album reviews - my thoughts on what I think have been the best two records released in 2005.

Modern Folk

A review of Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

Let’s be honest. The opening minute or so of this album is pretty pretentious. It’s one of those spoken introductions which I guess are supposed to sound off-the-cuff and ad-libbed. We hear Conor Oberst take a scripted sip from a glass of water, and then tell a story about a woman sitting on an aeroplane with a silent man…the plane crashes…the man speaks to the woman…and he sounds like a parent speaking to a small child – “We love you very, very, very, very, very much”. And then the fun begins. Because for all the planned implied nostalgia of the opening, this is a really good album – acoustic, loud and varied. This is a folk record for the modern day.

The first song, At the Bottom of Everything, introduces the listener to several of this album’s trademarks and recurring themes. Bright Eyes have created a remarkably economical use of music. Whether in the ballads or the loud and angry numbers, there are never many instruments on display at one time, and the sound quality has a metallic, verging on tinny, edge to it. There is no fuzz or feedback, and the harmonies have oceans between them – the singers are literally octaves apart, and the fused wall of sound that close harmony bands generate is a world away. Oberst is economical with his sentiments too, as the opening track demonstrates. After all its build-up, with bats, belfries, guns and deep water, it ends with the most throwaway and Zen-like of declamations: I’m happy just because I found out I’m really no one.

At the Bottom of Everything also contains some incredibly rapid mandolin arpeggio picking – avoiding easy-way-out repeated notes, this is Nebraska’s guitar picking speeded up a hundred-fold. Generally the album’s instrumentation is constantly interesting – and if this sounds like faint praise, listen to the way the brass instruments come in at the expense of the conventional band rather than to supplement it. This is an acoustic album with a difference.

And then there is Oberst’s voice. He has been accused of shouting instead of singing during his live performances, and there is an element of this on this album. There is certainly little finesse to the way he gets his words out, and although on some occasions he does show his gentle side, there is just so much emotion that you get the feeling he has to semi-speak some of his lines, because these are merely words which he has to get across to you; the fact that they’re part of a song is secondary. (For those of you who are by now fearing a vocal horror show – don’t panic. Emmylou Harris is a prominent and sublime guest on the album. Her performance on We Are Nowhere and It’s Now is reminiscent less of her recent duets with alt-country pin-up boys and more of her latter-day solo albums, and this record is all the better for it.)

So what is his voice – however imperfect – actually saying? What is the message that is so important that he has to express it in such a raw and unharnessed manner? Again we need to be honest – this album is not about getting across a new message, some revolutionary comment. But that’s okay; because what it does is communicate some classic political and cultural themes in an original manner. The gorgeous, gorgeous ballad (a duet with Emmylou Harris) Landlocked Blues delivers new ways of singing old laments:

A good woman will pick you apart
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended and you may be afraid
But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

And the album’s starting point, a reflection on the narrator’s younger days, is re-employed to make poetical comment on the degeneracy of society:

And there’s kids playing guns in the street
And ones pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say “enough is enough, If you walk away, I’ll walk away”
And he shot me dead

Bright Eyes’ fame was done no harm at all by their status as support act to Bruce Springsteen and REM during last year’s anti-Bush Vote for Change tour. But it would be a brave soul who denied that the tour was a home from home for the band. The album’s closing number, Road to Joy, again displays a refreshing originality in the way it lambasts the current US administration. It may take a couple of listens to reassure you that the song, at the point it really gets going, is an ironic take on what seems to be the attitude of Bush and company:

So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing
It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win
And no one’s sure how all of this got started
But we’re gonna make them goddam certain how its gonna end
Oh ya we will, oh ya we will!

After that, there is little more to say, and Conor Oberst is consistent to the end – a swift moment of self-depreciation as he makes fun of his own voice, another brief and concentrated burst of rage, and then a sudden (not violent, just abrupt) conclusion. That’s all, folks. No time for time-wasting – he got all that out of his system in the first minute of the album. The rest of it is purely and concisely crafted, and the result is the real deal.


Bruce Springsteen – Devils & Dust

Right around the time that most of America’s other major songwriters were making albums with a scaled-down sound, with a proud and organic acoustic sound reflective of the resurgence of folk and country music all the way down the food chain, Bruce Springsteen made The Rising (2002). Produced by Brendan O’Brien, famous for making records with a succession of hard-rocking bands, the album did not disappoint in that respect. The Rising is to be commended for trying to combine anti war sentiments with empathy for the victims of 9/11. But through a combination of the choice of title track, the songs chosen to open concerts on the tie-in tour (The Rising and Lonesome Day), and the fact that this was the first album recorded by the entire E Street Band in almost twenty years, The Rising is best remembered for its tub-thumping songs rather than its more thoughtfully-written and interesting-sounding songs. The sound on the album’s ‘big’ songs comes at you like a wash – nothing quite as well-defined as the wall of sound which Born to Run (1975) used to such great effect; more a big wet wave swooping at you with all the solid determination of a floundering fish.

Springsteen’s latest offering, Devils & Dust, is a different breed of album. Different stylistically, as the artist displays a delayed reaction to the ‘Americana’ boom and makes his own intimate, small-band album; different in terms of quality, because the album is a masterpiece.

Eight years ago, in his mid-fifties, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind (1997) – a much-vaunted return to form, in which the songwriter explored personal themes to a garage-band type backing. Springsteen is around the same age now that Dylan was when he made that album, and in a sense Devils & Dust is his Time Out of Mind. The songs are deeply personal – whether fictional or otherwise – and the directly political and economic messages of Springsteen’s 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, are rejected in favour of a more nuanced, personal, socio-political approach.

The title track, which opens the album, is an anti-war song of sorts: “I got my finger on the trigger / But I don’t know who to trust”. But as it winds towards its conclusion, and the band gradually grows, the subject matter surprisingly becomes more introspective, and the chorus asks more questions than it answers:

Well I’ve got God on my side
And I’m just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love

The next few songs follow similar personal lines, in the style of Springsteen’s best songwriting. All the Way Home is a re-hash of a song he wrote many years ago, but O’Brien’s production brings the song in line with the mood of the rest of the album. Springsteen swallows and mumbles his words as only he can, and it is left to O’Brien to command the song’s image with a McCartney-esque melodic bass line. Following this, Reno tells the story of a man who seeks solace from his problems with a prostitute – and doesn’t find anything like what he was after. Long Time Comin’ is an instrumental vehicle for the album’s small core band – Marty Rifkin excels on steel guitar. In actual fact, though, it is Springsteen's own guitar which defines the album’s sound for the most part. His acoustic playing always comes across as more thoughtful and mature than his electric playing (which sounds impressive but is actually not terribly imaginative). And on this album, it is his well-placed (at times sparse) acoustic playing which creates the album’s mood – intimate and reflective without being nostalgic or mawkish.

The middle part of Devils & Dust is what defines it as one Springsteen’s finest albums, artistically speaking. Black Cowboys is a tale of some forgotten heroes of Oklahoma, told through the eyes of a young boy. As you listen to the quiet, acoustic rumblings of the number, you are practically there in that dry place when

Come the fall the rain flooded these homes. Here in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, it fell hard and dark to the ground.

Some song lyrics are described as poetry, but usually this doesn’t really work – even the greatest song lyrics can sound somewhat silly without musical backing. But what Springsteen has created here is great prose – words which tell a short story in pure narrative form. It is no small achievement to shape such a story into a song. The CD slip-cover recognises this new style of songwriting, as the lyrics to this (and some other) songs are printed in paragraph form rather than line by line. Pretentious? A little. But some of these songs come close to being more story than song.

Springsteen’s tendency to mumble has been referred to, but the reader should not go away with the impression that that is the main vocal style of this album. The variety on display is actually very rich, to the extent that Springsteen complements three of the album’s lighter songs with a falsetto vocal. On Maria’s Bed and All I’m Thinkin’ About in particular, his high-pitched voice sounds surprisingly well-formed, and it seems to drive the band into playing with an impish delight, touching their strings and skins rather than striking and beating them.

Finally, Springsteen does recall the politics of the immigrant that underpinned The Ghost of Tom Joad. Matamoros Banks, with which Devils & Dust draws to a close, is a sister track to Across the Border – a poignant tale of love, loss and the search for a better life in the United States. The irony of such a dream cannot be lost on the artist, opening the album as he does with the line “I got my finger on the trigger”. But the humanity of both songs rings through - along with thanks to some higher being, Matamoros Banks’ narrator sings

Your sweet memory comes on the evenin’ wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again

The similarity with the picture painted in such all-American Springsteen songs as No Surrender cannot be lost on the listener, and perhaps this is what lies at the heart of the message of Devil & Dust – although there is a lot wrong with the world, and with the United States, the remedies and palliatives which Springsteen offers have remained consistent – love, hope and good dreams. With this album, he has kept that message alive by communicating it in a fresh manner, using a new music, and it really works.

Welcome

My name is Mike Short and this is my blog. The main aim of this blog, rather than being a repository for all manner of daily-life-whatever, is to be a place for me to post the stuff I write about music. I'm currently trying to write a book about 'alt-country' music, however poorly defined it is, and so I will post chapters of it here for people to read, comment on, and so on. But I also write one-off reviews of albums and gigs, and I will put them here as well.

I chose the name 'Fearless Romantics' for this site because it's one of those phrases that comes up time and again in the kind of music I like. It says a lot about what music should be about - a journey, pushing emotional and lyrical boundaries but with a good and kind heart.