BOB DYLAN - Tempest

There's a city, at the foot of the hill. Its streets have names that no human tongue has ever spoken. It's the Scarlet City, it's the land of the seven wonders of the world. "This is the place where I was born", sings Bob Dylan with his voice worn hollow by time. Because if Duluth was the birthplace of Robert Allen Zimmerman, his double belongs to another place: the homeland of Bob Dylan is the same as that of Henry Lee and Omie Wise, the homeland of the shadows of the "Anthology Of American Folk Music". "Evil and good living side by side, every human form seems glorified", he murmurs over the ancient fiddle of "Scarlet Town". Once he longed to reach the place where beauty had taken shape, in search of shelter from the storm. Now that the storm has arrived, that is where beauty has made its home. A scarlet beauty, as the cover of "Tempest" suggests.

The plebiscite that greets the release of every new Bob Dylan album, at least over the last decade, seems to have grown ever more indulgent each time around: in the case of "Tempest" it was enough to learn in advance that one of the songs would run past the fourteen-minute mark for people to cry masterpiece before even hearing it. But with a figure as elusive as Dylan, it's all too easy to fall back on convenient shortcuts. In reality, "Tempest" follows a much tighter continuity with its immediate predecessors than had been predicted. After all, the band is still the same one that has accompanied Dylan on stage during his tireless trek around the world, and the production reins remain firmly in his hands, with a touch that's just slightly more stripped-down than usual.

It's no surprise, then, that the soft shuffle with which "Duquesne Whistle" opens the record seems to come straight out of the old dance hall of "Love And Theft". It's the whistle of an abandoned factory, like the ones that were once the pride of the city of Duquesne. It's the whistle of a ghost train's locomotive, calling together everyone it meets along its path. "Listen to that Duquesne whistle blowin'/ Blowin' like it's gonna sweep my world away". And the world it leads to is a cruel, soulless world, as in the video directed by Nash Edgerton for the song: where even the naive rush of falling in love ends up trampled by violence, with Dylan's cynical sneer cutting through the slums at the head of a street gang.

"This is hard country to stay alive in/ Blades are everywhere and they're breaking my skin", "Narrow Way" declares right from the start. Greed, corruption, betrayal: the reality of "Tempest" closely recalls the decadent scenario Dylan imagined in the film "Masked And Anonymous". The pace is that of the tireless blues of "Modern Times", which on "Early Roman Kings" even turns into a near-replica of Muddy Waters' famous "Mannish Boy". Once again accompanying him is the accordion of David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, as was already the case on "Together Through Life". They could be the arrogant rulers of antiquity, or they could be the Bronx gang members who borrowed their name: Dylan's "Early Roman Kings" are equally treacherous and lecherous, equally capable of devouring souls and cities alike.

Between the Hank Williams-style country languor of "Soon After Midnight" and the sense of regret in "Long And Wasted Years", you have to wait for the pop-rock tones of "Pay In Blood" to encounter something less expected, somewhere between the Stones and Warren Zevon, whose vengeful growl would have been perfect for the Dylan of the late Seventies. But the real novelty of "Tempest" lies elsewhere: it's Dylan's return to narration, to storytelling in its most classic sense. A taste for vivid, torrential tale-telling that Dylan hadn't indulged in for years, and which he now seems ready to rediscover in the album's closing stretch.

This is probably the reason why "Tempest" already seems destined to be regarded as the high point of Dylan's output in the new millennium: his choice to once again don the storyteller's robes, even without the imaginative visionary quality of the past. On "Tin Angel" he lends his most Mephistophelian rasp to a bloody, obsessive murder ballad, built entirely around a dialogue with a grotesque flavour. On "Roll On John" he offers a belated funeral elegy for John Lennon, almost as if wanting to echo the one he wrote nearly thirty years ago for Lenny Bruce. But above all, it's the chronicle of the Titanic's sinking, across the more than forty verses of "Tempest", that claims a place of honour in Dylan's songbook.

Dancing to a waltz with Celtic echoes, the songwriter draws on the Carter Family's “The Titanic” to build a gallery of characters with a cinematic flair, and it's certainly no accident to find a “Leo” who points none too subtly to James Cameron's blockbuster. “People are going to say, well, it's not very truthful,” Mr. Zimmerman admits. “But a songwriter doesn't worry about what's truthful. What he's worried about is what should have happened, what could have happened. That's its own kind of truth.”

Once, faced with the storm, Dylan's concern would have been finding someone to blame. Even then, perhaps, he was telling his own kind of truth. Today, instead, his Titanic goes down with a sense of fatality, while the watchman dreams of the ship swallowed by the waves. Brother rises against brother with the blind fury of survival. Lovers say their goodbyes, officers weep over the pages of the Book of Revelation. But someone leaves his cabin to reach out a hand to those going under. And to raise his eyes to the sky.

This is what Dylan is interested in describing: how, in the moment of disaster, the true fabric of a man can be revealed. Or, in Camus's words, how in the face of misfortune man is forced to “rediscover or assume the greatest virtue: that of All or Nothing.” The storm, paradoxically, is the great opportunity. The opportunity to be oneself, even when beauty is as scarlet as blood.

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10/09/2012