Sentimental journey
ack when the formative ’50s took off into the soaraway ’60s, the generation gap between the parental bow-tie daddy and turned-on baby boomer was a gulf, and it extended to almost everything. Each had their figureheads, bugbears and touchstones. Though he never went to war, for America’s Greatest Generation Frank Sinatra had soundtracked every step of the way, from the run-up to Pearl Harbor to Ike’s peacetime cornucopia; the Hoboken Canary was the well-tailored everyman who sang and swung romance into every spanking new split-level suburban home with its pool-table front lawn and two-car driveway. For their children, Dylan’s generation with its intellectual and emotional boot-heels set to wandering, Sinatra was a corporate lifestyle shill, Chairman of the Boring and Mayor of Squaresville compared to outsider cats in hats whether cooling the clubs like Mingus and Miles or tearing it up in the backwoods like Guthrie and Williams. For Mom and Pop, better dead than Red; for Junior, better Hank than Frank. Even half a century after this cultural war raged at its height, eyebrows lifted when in 2014 Bob Dylan cut a bunch of songs, 10 of them released last year as Shadows In The Night, famously sung by Sinatra. True, that great Dylan interpreter Rod Stewart had latterly hit big with his Great American Songbook albums mining a similar seam (“Ella was a big favourite of mine when I was 17 or 18. Back then in the early ’60s it wasn’t at all cool to like Ella Fitzgerald. It was Mum and Dad’s taste”). But Rod’s a notorious old crowd-pleaser, while Dylan is, well, Dylan. Which means something quite different these days from its old guru-hood. Dylan cuts an album of Christmas chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Dylan sells hardware for IBM and underwear for Victoria’s Secret. Dylan does what he pleases. Actually, he always has. Fundamentalists of the idea of Dylan having reset Year-Zero on the American songcraft clock can’t say they weren’t warned. A few of these Tin Pan Alley songs have popped up in his setlists since the ’90s, and in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan recalls finding Judy Garland’s hit The Man That Got Away on a New York beatnik hang-out’s jukebox. Its tunesmith was Harold Arlen, famous for “the cosmic” Over The Rainbow. “In Harold’s songs I could hear rural blues and folk music. There was an
Bemotional kinship there. I couldn’t help but notice it.” With lyricist Johnny Mercer, Arlen also wrote That Old Black Magic and Come Rain Or Come Shine, both of which Dylan sings here. Likewise remembered in Chronicles, Dylan obsessed over another of the few ‘pop’ records to be found on the jukeboxes of the early-’60s Greenwich Village bohemia: “I used to play the phenomenal Ebb Tide by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice – death, God and the universe, everything. I had other things to do, though, and I couldn’t be listening to that stuff much.” What Dylan gives us in these recordings is something of a sentimental memoir. Though his creative journey from Bobby to ‘Dylan’ started at around 10 years old when hearing Johnnie Ray on the radio and then Hank Williams broadcast on the Grand Ole Opry, our hero’s first musical performance predated this conscious quickening of his musical spirit: aged four at a family party he brought the house down with his renditions of Accentuate The Positive and Some Sunday Morning, songs of sweetness and pep for the folks at home with seemingly nothing in common with his thrillingly modern yet deeprooted songs two decades later, save for the raw materials from which they were crafted – words, melody and harmony. Yet he has form as a writer in this idiom in such songs as 2001’s Moonlight, arguably even 1969’s Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You. Though Dylan in his first flowering seemed to channel his genius out of the ether, he has always been a studious and meticulous song craftsman. Even so, in reverting to his first language of song – American mainstream pop radio before he started twirling the dial in search of that otherworld backwoods magic and mystery – Dylan finds himself expressing feelings of an innocence, if not quite artlessness, that he did so much to render quaint to the point of obsolete with his own songs, which expressed complex emotional and moral positions in language charged with resonances way beyond those of the picket fence and Great White Way of his parents’ generation. Yet as both a serial romantic and a septuagenarian with grandchildren reminding him of his own younger self, Dylan sings these songs of country dances, moonlight embraces, homespun wisdom and true hearts with sincere conviction. As an interpreter he reaches through their melodic and lyrical charm to their essential provision of elegantly consoling wisdom and approval to the stormtossed lover, just as such songs as Like A Rolling Stone and Idiot Wind mimicked the storm itself and gave artistic shape to otherwise wrackingly chaotic feelings. In short, Tin Pan Alley and Dylan offer radically different but by no means mutually exclusive answers to the same question: how to bottle love’s lightning. Following Shadows In The Night, Fallen Angels’ 12 songs are the second batch from the 23 recorded in Hollywood’s famed Capitol Records’ Studio B in 2014. All but Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer’s Skylark were recorded by Sinatra; some songs famously, like Young At Heart, others, like On A Little Street In Singapore, less so. As a singer, Dylan is no Sinatra, of course, carefully tracking as