Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Dylan and Young: Old dogs and masterpieces
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life …
— Bob Dylan, “False Prophet”
Just the other night, as the end credits to “The Nordic Model,” a recent episode of Showtime’s Billions, began to roll, we heard the swirlingup-from-the-bottom accordion of Garth Hudson, the careful-stepping bass of Rick Danko and the plaintive growl of Levon Helm singing Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”
That must have cost the show’s producers some, but then Billions is not a show that skimps on its music budget. It might have been a little too on the nose for this particular episode, in which hedge fund plutocrat Bobby Axelrod (Damien Lewis) realizes that Wendy (Maggie Siff), the soon-to-be-ex-wife of his nemesis Chuck Rhoads (Paul Giamatti) and not-so-secret-crush is starting to fall for Axe’s pet abstract artist Nico Tanner (Frank Grillo).
So Axe has to punish the artist by dragging him into his transactional web of obligations, forcing him to paint a straight-up portrait of the U.S. treasury secretary so that Axe can get his own bank charter. Meanwhile, he’s cyber-stalking Wendy who, it is implied, he always thought was going to be with him, when he paints his masterpiece.
Using this song — a version off The Band’s 1971 album Cahoots — in service of a perfectly enjoyable but ultimately disposable cable soap opera feels a little like using an authentic van Gogh to dress the set of a community theater production of
The Highest Yellow. You might expect the audience to be distracted by it.
Bob Dylan was 29 years old when he recorded “When I Paint My Masterpiece” in New York in March 1971. He went into Blue Rock Studios to
record a couple of songs to fill out the compilation album Bob Dylan’s
Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, with Leon Russell producing and playing piano.
I’m not sure Dylan saw himself as a young man at the time — he’d been recording for nine years — but
“When I Paint My Masterpiece” is a young man’s song, with a protagonist expressing something like nostalgia for the future:
Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent When I paint my masterpiece.
You could argue that by then most of Dylan’s masterpieces were already in the past. Blood on the Tracks was coming up, and the Rolling Thunder Revue and “Every Grain of Sand”
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life …
— Bob Dylan, “False Prophet”
Just the other night, as the end credits to “The Nordic Model,” a recent episode of Showtime’s Billions, began to roll, we heard the swirling-up-from-the-bottom accordion of Garth Hudson, the careful-stepping bass of Rick Danko and the plaintive growl of Levon Helm singing Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.”
That must have cost the show’s producers some, but then Billions is not a show that skimps on its music budget. It might have been a little too on the nose for this particular episode, in which hedge fund plutocrat Bobby Axelrod (Damien Lewis) realizes that Wendy (Maggie Siff), the soon-to-be-ex-wife of his nemesis Chuck Rhoads (Paul Giamatti) and not-so-secret-crush is starting to fall for Axe’s pet abstract artist Nico Tanner (Frank Grillo).
So Axe has to punish the artist by dragging him into his transactional web of obligations, forcing him to paint a straight-up portrait of the U.S. treasury secretary so that Axe can get his own bank charter. Meanwhile, he’s cyber-stalking Wendy who, it is implied, he always thought was going to be with him, when he paints his masterpiece.
Using this song — a version off The Band’s 1971 album Cahoots — in service of a perfectly enjoyable but ultimately disposable cable soap opera feels a little like using an authentic van Gogh to dress the set of a community theater production of The Highest Yellow. You might expect the audience to be distracted by it.
Bob Dylan was 29 years old when he recorded “When I Paint My Masterpiece” in New York in March 1971. He went into Blue Rock Studios to record a couple of songs to fill out the compilation album Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, with Leon Russell producing and playing piano.
I’m not sure Dylan saw himself as a young man at the time — he’d been recording for nine years — but “When
I Paint My Masterpiece” is a young man’s song, with a protagonist expressing something like nostalgia for the future: Someday, everything is
gonna be diff’rent When I paint my masterpiece.
You could argue that by then most of Dylan’s masterpieces were already in the past. Blood on the Tracks was coming up, and the Rolling Thunder Revue and “Every Grain of Sand” and the Never Ending Tour, but Dylan did his best work in his 30s and 40s.
He has admitted he can’t write that kind of song anymore, that he has had to find new ways to try to tap into his subconscious. Artists can keep making art for a long time — Edward Hopper painted Chair Car when he was 83 — but sometimes they have to make adjustments and lean into their limitations. The richer veins having played out, Dylan now scrapes his caves for glittering silt and stray nuggets. Maybe you know the feeling.
He’s got a new album; his first of original material since 2012, having spent the interval releasing American standards written by the likes of Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. It’s called Rough and Rowdy Ways and has attracted a number of rave reviews. In the Los Angeles Times, Mikael Wood notes its comic savagery and says, musically at least, it “rolls out one marvel after another.”
It’s 70 minutes of music, 10 songs spread across two CDs or albums. (While the material would fit on one CD, Dylan believes that audio quality is affected if you cram more
than 32 minutes of music onto a vinyl record. So you need a double album, so why not two CDs as well? If you’re downloading or streaming there’s no physical delivery system anyway.)
It’s probably not Dylan’s post-Nobel masterpiece, but it is a record uncannily suited for our locked-down anxious times. At 79, Dylan has settled into his blues and acquired an unparalleled authority among American artists. Rough and Rowdy Ways is a dense, dark little universe unto itself, perhaps as much a work of excavation as of sculpture. Dylan is rattling around in his own subconscious, a guide who presents as a cross between Marty Feldman and Dante’s Virgil.
You can hear that most clearly in “Murder Most Foul,” his 16-minute and 56-second answer song to “American Pie” that posits the John F. Kennedy assassination as the point where the American experiment went wrong. With something of the paranoiac shape and black humor of a James Ellroy novel, it’s nevertheless weirdly reassuring, a reaffirmation that the old American weirdness, which seems very much upon us now, has always been with us.
Two other singles have followed since then. “I Contain Multitudes,” a gentle-by-comparison ballad that invokes the work of Walt Whitman and Irish wandering bard Antoine Ó Raifteirí as well as Anne Frank and The Rolling Stones. “False Prophet,” a bouncing blues-night jam based on Billy “the Kid” Emerson’s obscure 1954 B-side “If Lovin’ Is Believing,” name-checks Sun Records’ Jimmy Wages’ Miss Pearl (“Daylight recalls you, hang your head, go home” he sang in the 1957 track) and Ricky Nelson’s Mary Lou,
casting them as “fleet-footed guides to the underworld.”
Dylan’s preoccupations here are celebrity and fame and authenticity and maybe legacy too, though there’s some unmistakable playfulness in his boasting — a little homage to Muhammad Ali.
With his voice alternating between a wheeze and a surprisingly robust baritone, Dylan commands these songs even though he has lost the suppleness that was present in his classic recordings. He is a strategic singer now, one who seems to plot his way through every tune like a free climber surveying a fresh face.
The covers have helped him; one could look at the last nine years as a period of re-education, as Dylan learned a few new tricks to compensate for the loss of his old yowl. Now he’s got the Old Testament growl and something more tender. I bet he can nail “When I Paint My Masterpiece” now, though he’d have to go some to cut Levon’s version.
Elsewhere, the record seems to uphold the standard set by the singles: “My Own Version” is probably the funniest song Dylan has ever written, and it’s as densely allusive as his vintage work.“Dark Rider” is a most successful version of the Bergman film Dylan has tried to write before, the one about Death and the cowboy. “Crossing the Rubicon” is probably my favorite song, the one that feels the most inevitable and timeless.
“Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is an ambling 9-minute look back at a colorfully lived life, a fictive autobiography not that different from the yarns young Dylan spun. Dylan’s not writing about himself, we know that now, but maybe part of it is about amusing himself.
It also feels like an artifact from the 1950s, like a record the 17-year-old Dylan might
have dreamed of making before he changed things for everyone, including himself. This is an angel — a weary and hard-used angel with a snarling tongue, but an angel nevertheless — looking homeward.
. . .
“Also out this week” might be a lame way to segue into Neil Young’s finally released
Homegrown, recorded in 1974 and 1975, not too long after Young finished On the Beach and some abortive sessions with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young was writing and recording prolifically during this time, and his relationship with Carrie Snodgrass was falling apart.
Homegrown was almost released in 1975; Reprise Records had commissioned a cover. But at the last minute Young decided not to release the album, in its place releasing the grief-infused Tonight’s the Night, which had been recorded in 1973 in the wake of the drug overdose deaths of Young’s friends and collaborators guitarist Danny Gatton and roadie Bruce Berry.
Tonight’s the Night had originally been withheld because Young had judged it tough to listen to. Early copies of the record included an insert with a note from Young reading, “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”
(Further complicating Young’s mythology is the rumored existence of an alternate
version of Tonight’s the Night that’s even bleaker than what was released. In his memoir, Neil and Me, Young’s father, Scott Young, described a conversation he had with David Briggs, who co-produced the album: “I want to tell you, it is a handful,” Briggs said. “It is unrelenting. There is no relief in it at all. It does not release you for one second. It’s like some guy having you by the throat from the first note, and all the way to the end.”)
The legend is that Young decided to release Tonight’s the Night after he gathered some friends for a listening party for
Homegrown. He noticed that
Tonight’s the Night was on the same reel-to-reel tape as the new album, and he decided to play — and subsequently release — it instead of Homegrown.
“I apologize,” Young recently posted on the homepage of Neil Young Archives. “This album Homegrown should have been there for you a couple of years after
Harvest. It’s the sad side of a love affair. The damage done. The heartache. I just couldn’t listen to it. I wanted to move on. So I kept it to myself, hidden away in the vault, on the shelf, in the back of my mind … but I should have shared it. It’s actually beautiful. That’s why I made it in the first place. Sometimes life hurts. You know what I mean. This is the one that got away ….
“Levon Helm is drumming on some tracks, Karl T. Him