Bob Dylan

Rough And Rowdy Ways

His thirty-ninth album is a masterly late summation of his artistic vision

There can come a point in a great rock artist’s career, after they’ve weathered mid-life ridicule, at which they are regarded as supreme and beyond reproach. It happened to Leonard Cohen, to Paul McCartney, to David Bowie. In the 80s, Dylan, like Bowie, wasn’t always taken terribly seriously, instead regarded as doddery and out of touch, dallying dubiously with religion on Saved, releasing tracks like Wiggle, Wiggle, clopping along behind the pace he’d once set, just another Traveling Wilbury.

Since 1997’s Time Out Of Mind, however, Dylan’s stock has risen again. He has nothing left to prove, no significant new developments in rock to keep up with, existing now in a rarified stratosphere, above and beyond mere considerations of ‘relevance’, ageing but with his ancient marbles very much intact.

His new album Rough And Rowdy Ways affirms this. Yes, this is an old man, a much slower man, living off hindsight. He no longer sounds like himself, but more like the singer Tom Waits affects to be, his voice husky with accrued experience. There’s barely a toot from his trademark harmonica. His house band, as well as guest musicians including Fiona Apple, provide the backing here, giving subordinate but immaculate service, a backdrop of discreet, almost alt.rock brushwork, rivulets of piano, shuffling guitar, tinkling chimes and droplets of bass. It’s like the fixtures, fittings and brown oaks of a much-loved bar, with Dylan in the chair, holding forth.

There’s also a sense of the cinematic about Rough And Rowdy Ways, its title having an element of the Coen Brothers about it, an untold tale from The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs. Allusions to cinema abound on the album: The Godfather, Indiana Jones, A Nightmare On Elm Street. There’s a general sense, too, of The Irishman, Scorsese, Pacino and DeNiro’s comeback, only with this album Dylan’s age is an advantage, not something that must be CGI’d away. And, like a piece of cinema, you hesitate, unusually, to reveal too much about the album’s lyrical twists for fear of spoilers, the punch line to Key West (Philosopher Pirate) being a case a point.

On the face of it there’s a certain cinematic clarity about the album. No jewels and binoculars hanging from the head of any mules, rather an attempt to descend from his foggy plinth and explain himself, as if to a generation who never heard of him, except third-hand I Contain Multitudes sees him rap like an old, selfaggrandising bluesman about who he is and what he does, the great artistic traditions in which he belongs, comparing himself, perversely, to Anne Frank and Indiana Jones. ‘Got a tell-tell heart like Mr Poe… I paint landscapes and I paint nudes.’

What’s immediately evident, however, is that for all this show revelation and lucidity, Dylan is having fun with us. He’s always been thoroughly amused by the awestruck scrutiny applied to him by fans and fools alike, ever since he was asked in the 1960s how many protest singers there were in America. “About 136,” he replied. ‘Do it with laugher and do it with tears,’ he sings on My Own Version Of You, on which he imagines raiding morgues and monasteries ‘looking for body parts’ to bring someone to life. And that’s the spirit in which he approaches this album, at once playful and paradoxical, bearing unwrapped lyrical gifts in songs like False Prophet, which on inspection require further unpacking, while gazing retrospectively at the long journey through this vale of tears he has undertaken, contemplating, as is his recent wont, mortality, and not just his own. There are also moments of true humility and grace, as on I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You, the Zimmerman as if on a Zimmer frame at an octogenarian wedding. Or Mother Of Muses, in which, in supplication, he invokes Martin Luther King.

Rough And Rowdy Ways covers an extensive history and topography in its allusions to the places and times of Dylan’s back pages, from Italy to East LA. All of this comes together on the album’s centrepiece, Murder Most Foul. This piece reveals arguable weaknesses on Dylan’s part; his JFK-style insistence that multiple parties were involved in the Kennedy assassination, and the limits to his rock’n’roll allusions – The Who, The Beatles, the Stones – are somewhat trite and peter out after 1970, when he turns instead to cinema. A shout out at least to Joni Mitchell would have been nice. Still, the tumbling sprawl of this piece, flashing back and forward between Dallas and the future is undeniable in its evocation of the America Dylan inherited, amid the shattered ruins of the idealistic Camelot Kennedy represented, over whose fragments we are still stumbling today.

Rough And Rowdy Ways is unique, precious testimony from an elderly rock’n’roll survivor who, for all the games he plays, is a seer nonetheless. And what he has seen, in his mind’s eye, no one else has or will. ■■■■■■■■■■