Well, your first question might be: who the fuck names a record Rough and Rowdy Ways?
On October 22nd, 1929, the yodeler, hobo, blackface minstrel and white-faced clown Jimmie Rodgers recorded half a dozen songs in the banquet hall of Dallas’ Jefferson Hotel. This era is remote, even to itself. The LP album will not take hold as recorded music’s dominant medium for several decades. There are songs, and the riddles beneath them: ripples of hearsay and coincidence, lone flights of inspiration. Night is vast, the mighty seasons as yet unwarped by the furnaces of modernity.
Rodgers, the ‘father of country music,’ was also one of the world’s first pop stars, rising to fame on the strength of his hit ‘Blue Yodel’ recordings rather than concert appearances. His first 78, ‘Blue Yodel (T For Texas),’ reached the Kipsigis tribe of east Africa by way of gramophone-bearing British missionaries in the years following World War II, conjuring for the villagers a half-man, half-antelope satyr (‘Chemirocha’) and an eponymous song. (British ethnomusicologist Diane Thram was met with bemusement when she tried to ‘give back’ a CD of the recording to the Kipsigis in 2015, who asked for a version compatible with their mobile phones instead.) ‘Chemirocha’ is as spirited and familiar-yet-uncanny as its inspiration; until the voices enter, its stoic strumming evokes a Lomax field recording from Appalachia or the Dust Bowl. In Dallas, less than four years from his death from tuberculosis at 35, Rodgers sang:
Somehow, I can’t forget my good old rambling days
The railroad trains are calling me away
I may be rough, I may be wild,
I may be tough and counted vile
But I can’t give up my good old rough and rowdy ways
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Because this is Bob we’re talking about, any of this may be irrelevant, sacrosanct, merely interesting. This after all is an artist as likely to, erm, borrow portions of his Nobel lecture from SparkNotes as fabricate entire sections of his memoir. Homage, misdirection, in-joke, Burroughsian cut-up, nose-thumb, water-wheel turning in the great authorless American folk reservoir: all are likely, all essentially the same. Having invented archetypes as primordial as ‘the singer-songwriter’—and with much of the last 60 years of popular music seeming to have sprung from his blurry forehead—endlessly remixable before-times have always appeared at least as arcane and alive (and available) for Dylan as the many presents through which he’s wandered. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, his peers are phantoms and idols: Bessie Smith, Jimmie Rodgers, Dock Boggs, Little Richard—whom 17-year-old Robert Zimmerman wrote in his senior yearbook it was his greatest ambition to join—his idioms Greek epic, Chicago blues, antebellum balladry and corner-store rhyme.
Timelessness—the mind out of time—has been a governing principle in Dylan’s work at least as far back as the amphetamine dreams of Highway 61 Revisited, wherein several millennia of myth and popular culture are telescoped: Ma Rainey and Beethoven between the sheets of a bedroll, the king of the Philistines prodding troops into the Gulf of Tonkin, Yahweh directing Abraham to some doomful Middle American switchback. Here is a dangerous imagination let loose in a half-formed genre, further set on knife’s edge by the wild-mercury elusiveness of analog recording with its absence of quantification, nostalgia, or screens. Music from this epoch, and Dylan’s in particular, is a little scary in its impudent mysteriousness. Mistakes are left in. Songs stretch on and on for entire sides of records. (Records have sides.) In concert, tsunami of amplification meet cries of betrayal, and every line the singer lets out seems to test some ineffable limit.
OK, you may have heard this one before. That era ended and danger found new avatars. The 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour was the last appearance of a really dangerous Dylan, musically speaking, and for the next two decades or so his strategy as a sound-artist involved embracing stylistic change wherever the pulse seemed to go, with little thought for the ever-widening distance between these trends and his own strengths (late ‘70s—slick horn sections and backup singers; ‘80s—disco and synthesizers; 90’s—MTV Unplugged-esque direct-injected acoustic guitars, the opposite of the analog warmth of his early unaccompanied ‘folk singer’ sound). The impressionistic, haloed Time Out of Mind (1997) is a transition point and Rough and Rowdy Ways’ clearest aural antecedent; since then, his records—the cheery Civil War reenactments and rocking-chair riddles of 2001’s Love and Theft and 2006’s Modern Times especially—have evoked the electrical otherworldliness of his mid-’60s period without matching their precariousness.
This one-foot-in, one-foot-out relationship with the sonics of modern recording has taken the sting out of the tail of most of Dylan’s recent work, enjoyable though it is. But Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first record to move beyond a nostalgia for past danger and into something like…well, transcendence. It is his most expansive—very possibly infinite—album.
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It’s not perfect—‘Black Rider,’ as my housemate put it, ‘sucks.’ The album cover looks like a loading screen from an early-aughts CD-ROM game, and not in a tight way. Dylan’s go-to studio phalanx perhaps a little too effortlessly hop idioms; they are augmented by Fiona Apple, fresh off her triumphant and zeitgeisty Fetch the Bolt Cutters, who turns up to tickle ivories and ooo cosmically into the sunset, and Blake Mills, current ‘dunking indie rock in auditory polymer so it’s relevant’ producer du jour, who bestows tasteful little Telecaster licks throughout. But crucially, Dylan has made peace with the sterilizing effects of digital recording, aiming not for an echo of his glory days, but instead settling into a studied relaxedness. For Time Out of Mind, producer Daniel Lanois created loops of rhythm tracks, allowing Dylan to develop half-finished material on the fly over his band’s artificially-extended reconnaissance. A similar technique probably engendered Rough and Rowdy Ways’ hazy myth-world, which, rather than fronting rock ‘n’ roll bawlz, frees the singer to surf the tides of his insanely wide-ranging and graceful lyrics.
Beginning with:
Today, and tomorrow, and yesterday, too The flowers are dying like all things do
this album is full with death and what is beyond. Winters, summers, and springs abound, turning always in sets of two or more. Each song warily, charmedly, hauntedly circles this theme:
I sleep with life and death in the same bed
and
Can’t remember when I was born And I forgot when I died
and
I can see the history of the whole human race It’s all right there, it’s carved into your face… You’ve got what they call the immortal spirit You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn’ It creeps in your body the day you were born
and
Well, my heart’s like a river, a river that sings Just takes me a while to realize things I’ve seen the sunrise, I’ve seen the dawn I’ll lay down beside you when everyone’s gone
Would-be lovesongs like ‘I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You’ and the Frankenstein ekphrasis ‘My Own Version of You’ take on an altogether different hue in this context. The latter sees Dylan raise a golem of electricity and muscle in a clap of thunder, teaching it, among other things, to play piano ‘like Leon Russell / Like Liberace, like St. John the Apostle’ and confiding an entire cosmological order from life-giving heavens to ‘the burning hell / Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell.’ (I’m leaving out the names of the damned as a surprise for your first listen.) It dawns that we’re not talking about a flesh-and-blood creature so much as the act of creation itself: ‘I'll bring someone to life, someone for real / Someone who feels the way that I feel.’ We are within and without the song; life and death in the same bed. The former, meanwhile, is simply one of the loveliest songs in Dylan’s entire canon.
As the album progresses, its legions engulf us. We hear edges and boundaries fall away: blood from a cactus, gunpowder from ice. We hear a fairly irrefutable come-on to the Muses, but also that ‘the size of your cock will get you nowhere.’ We hear every single song Dylan calls on in the wake of the JFK assassination; NPR has a playlist and it’s seven hours long. We hear Matthew 5 (‘Oh you poor devil, look up if you will / The city of God is there on the hill’) and Isaiah 53, or possibly Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s collage masterpiece JFK (‘Led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb’)—though for Stone, this referred to Oswald, not Kennedy. We hear an off-mic ‘Oh, Lord…’ five and a half minutes into ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ that is the most heart-stopping moment on the whole album: an actual recording from the beyond. We hear that the soul of a nation has been torn away, and boy do it hit different.
We hear names dropped—everywhere. During initial listens I was struck by how many proper nouns this album has, notwithstanding that a fascination with where people/places end and song begins has run throughout Dylan’s career, and that references to ancient rivers, military generals, and fellow drug-addled seers are par for the course. Perhaps this all-identifying collectivism is so striking because of what a rough and rowdy time this country is having with its history at the moment; into an era of statue-toppling Dylan has released an album littered with them. But Dylan’s multitudes contain those ‘born on the wrong side of the railroad track,’ too: Anne Frank and the long-dead bluesman Jimmy Reed are tried on as possible selves. The identity of both speaker and audience shifts verse-by-verse and line-by-line. Most unexpectedly and movingly, we get this character, who pops up toward the end of the album:
Twelve years old, they put me in a suit Forced me to marry a prostitute There were gold fringes on her wedding dress That’s my story, but not where it ends She’s still cute, and we’re still friends
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This feels like it could be the last one. Rough and Rowdy Ways shares the autumnal heartsong of recent beyond-the-grave final acts from Leonard Cohen and David Bowie. Likewise, the spirit of The Tempest (not to be confused with Tempest, Dylan’s previous album of original material, from 2012), with its wistful, glinting twilight and fabled ‘farewell to the stage,’ hovers throughout Rough and Rowdy Ways, particularly in the stunning ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate),’ where a Prospero-like drifter glides through the island town and takes us very close to heaven. ‘Key West is the place to be / If you’re looking for immortality,’ Dylan croons. ‘Beyond the sea, beyond the shifting sand.’
Once again, we begin elsewhere. The opening lines of ‘Key West’ quote Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers’ ‘White House Blues’ (1926), which Dylan learned before the beginning of his career from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, our nation’s eternal and bottomless founding document. A few lifetimes and apocalypses ago, ‘White House Blues,’ along with the other twenty-six songs from Volume One, was performed at the 2019 Harry Smith Frolic I attended in the woods of western Massachusetts. The spirit or man who stepped forward—by the bonfirelight it was hard to tell—introduced it by saying, ‘I’ll just point out that this is one of three songs tonight about the assassination of a sitting U.S. President,’ drawing a few chuckles and whoops before launching into:
McKinley hollered, McKinley squalled Doc said, ‘McKinley, I can’t find the ball From Buffalo to Washington.’ Roosevelt in the White House, he’s doing his best McKinley in the graveyard, he’s taking his rest He’s gone a long, long time.
Like John F. Kennedy, William McKinley was murdered by a man who went by Leon, radicalized by events overseas until losing faith in the American experiment altogether. Wikipedia, that sympathetic chronicler, tells it thus: ‘Czolgosz believed there was a great injustice in American society, an inequality which allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor. He concluded that the reason for this was the structure of government itself.’
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Amanda Petrusich, writing in The New Yorker, elegantly shoehorns Rough and Rowdy Ways into the political dilemmas of our moment, riding Dylan’s teeming imagination to connect far-flung dots of tragedy and jubilation:
Dylan’s vast and intersectional understanding of the American mythos feels so plainly and uniquely relevant to the grimness and magnitude of these past few months. As the country attempts to metabolize the murder of George Floyd, it is also attempting to reckon with every crooked, brutal, odious, or unjust murder of a black person—to understand a cycle that began centuries ago and somehow continues apace. What is American racism? It’s everything, Dylan insists. Indiana Jones and J.F.K. and Elvis Presley and Jimmy Reed—nothing exists without the rest of it. None of us are absolved, and none of us are spared.
Notwithstanding that at least ‘Murder Most Foul,’ and perhaps other songs too, supposedly date to the Tempest sessions nearly ten years ago, this is the only writing I’ve seen this year to aptly measure the towering multitudes of this album and its countless linkages to 2020. I’ll go a step further, though. The project of Rough and Rowdy Ways—its proper nouns, its dislocation from time and place, its triplicated moods—is to weave reality itself into the fabric of Dylan’s American dream-tapestry. Our moment (any moment, but especially ours) calls for popular song that aspires to such timeless, twelve-dimensional, identity-fusing, death-taunting, doggedly hopeful collage of the longed-after and too-long-ignored. The most recent exposures of our true history might easily go hand-in-hand with cynicism, the refusal of the rosy and common: you won’t get away with fooling me. But when Dylan sings, ‘I don’t think I can bear to live my life alone,’ his loneliness is cosmic. We should notice that.
In his 2001 happy-birthday screed A Tale of Two Dylans, the late, great Ian MacDonald cast the singer as a would-be sage searching for transcendence:
Like most great pop music of the sixties, Dylan’s was about raising consciousness. Indeed, if he could sit still long enough to meditate, he might yet break through to the all-loving unitive awareness which he’s been bumping his head up against for so long — thereby, at the very least, getting happy and perhaps becoming the wry old spiritual sage which one part of him has probably been hoping to turn into since the days of his ‘amazing projections’ in Hibbing.
Rough and Rowdy Ways appears to be the culminating vision of that wizened old man of the mountain. He stays to the left, but leans to the right; he’s in Key West, gazing at the horizon line.
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MILES HEWITT is a musician and poet living in Brooklyn. He graduated from Harvard College in 2018, where his poetry collection The Candle is Forever Learning to Sing received numerous awards, including the David McCord Prize for unusual creative talent and the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize for best poem by an undergraduate. He records and ‘performs’ (remotely, for now) with The Solars.
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ROSE SHERMAN is an artist and illustrator from Portland, OR, now based in Brooklyn, NY. All of her work, from music to murals, can be found either on her website, roseisabel.com, or on Instagram, @heyshermie.