RACHEL JOHNSON
BOB SAVES THE BEST TILL LAST
It was a mean trick of Robert Zimmerman, late of Duluth, Minnesota, to release his new album in his 80th year, on Father’s Day, as I contemplated my father also turning 80 this summer.
It is a milestone we all face with composure and gratitude (my father’s 80th, that is) and to me, as a fan and as a daughter, this felt like ‘a moment’.
Picture the scene: I was listening to his new release, Rough and Rowdy Ways, for the first time. (It is in the Top 40 already – Dylan has had a chart-topping album every decade since the Sixties.) My father stomped into my house in Dunlop wellies, threw social distancing to the four winds and gave me a sudden hug – and I couldn’t help it.
We Johnsons are not given to public displays of emotion but I had to dart into the larder because that embrace, the first from him for months, on that day, in this year, together with the music, was almost too much.
The album has already been rightly hailed as a growly, bluesy masterpiece, and ever since it dropped on the summer solstice I have had it playing in my ear (Airpods, folks), with the chills multiplying.
God knows when he wrote it, but the album – from I Contain Multitudes via Black Rider to the final, monumental, 17-minute monster track, Murder Most Foul, about the death of JFK – manages to annotate and define not just every emotion I have had during the COVID-19 crisis, but also every political impulse from Trump to Black Lives Matter to Me Too via the great Awokening.
Listen to it from beginning to end (while reading Spencer Leigh’s new biography, Bob Dylan: Outlaw Blues). It’s romantic, sad and wise; it’s a hymnal and a spiritual to life and death. Its words have the thudding force of the Ten Commandments and the rapturous inevitability of Judgement Day.
The finale, Murder Most Foul, the masterpiece of the masterpiece, contains the most multitudes: ‘It was a dark day in Dallas, November ’63, a day that will live on in infamy,’ he grumbles. Then he thunders out a hypnotic tour d’horizon: a bareback rhythmic ride through the history of pop, civil rights, presidential politics and culture.
After it ends, you know this in your muddy waters. Poetry and music are more important than history. Don’t ask what you can do for your country, as in the end it doesn’t matter. All flesh is grass and Trump too shall pass, but the songs, the words and the music will remain.
I want to listen to this as I lie a-dying. God knows if it is Dylan’s last, but it is one of his best.
Rough and Rowdy Ways is out now