Bob Dylan: Together Through Life

Dim light. The border town cafe is tacky and dingy but at least it’s clean. You’ve been hanging out in this place for as long as you can remember. Smoking is still allowed. There’s the smell of smoke mixed in with the aromas of whiskey, tequila and beer. The talk becomes a whisper when the band meanders on the stage. The accordion player is new, you recognize the guitarist. The familiar voice of the singer is rougher than ever, but he’s as happy to see the crowd as the crowd is to see him.

“Together Through Life” is Bob Dylan’s most atmospheric album. The project started with the song, “Life is Hard,” which Dylan wrote for a film by French director, Olivier Dahan. He then enlisted Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead Lyricist and writing partner of Jerry Garcia and quickly recorded this inspired collection of songs. David Hilgado, from the great Los Lobos, plays accordion, giving the same sort of inventive and distinctive texture that Al Kooper’s organ gave “Blonde on Blonde” or Scarlet Rivera’s violin gave “Desire.” The progenitor track, “Life is Hard,” is a European cabaret sounding ballad, where the accordion is perfectly normal. Dylan then traverses back to his more usual landscape of American blues. Dylan’s most recent records, “Modern Times” and “Love & Theft,” feature an accomplished mosaic of styles—rock and roll, crooner ballads, and various iterations of blues. “Together Through Life” is also a pastiche, although the blues predominate. The accordion and lonesome lyrics about love amidst desolation augment the end-of-the-line, border town, feel while also exploring the rarely acknowledged common ground of Tex-Mex music and Blues.

“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” begins the journey in a rockin sort of samba on a melody line that reminds me of the song by the Sonny Boy Williamson (I think #2) “Stop Me From Talkin,” which Dylan played in an infamous version on the David Letterman show in the 80s. Mike Campbell, the guitarist in Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, plays some searing guitar. In this song in particular, there is a grooving interchange of riffs between the accordion and the guitar. David Herron, who is with the great BR459 and is a multi-instrumentalist, plays a real sour sounding trumpet, reminiscent of those salvation army revival horns on “Blonde on Blonde.” The narrator, at times cajoling—and other times, consoling—his lover, “pretty baby,” that no matter how bleak the present might seem, the present is all they have: “your love is my throne/beyond here lies nothin/nothin we can call our own.”

Hunter has previously collaborated with Dylan. “Silvio,” a Dylan/Hunter collaboration, is considered kind of a light weight addition to the canon, nonetheless in the mid-90s concert performances, Silvio was often the climatic rocker of the show. Dylan is said to have found the lyric in a Hunter notebook and just added the music. The credits on “Together Through Life” specify that Hunter wrote only the lyrics, but unlike “Silvio” the lyrics are obviously not the sole creation of Hunter.

Dylan’s most recent period of songwriting began with “Time Out of Mind” in 1997, which followed years of intensive touring, two acoustic cover albums and the mixed-bag of 80s releases. “I’m Walkin through streets that are dead,” the opening lyric of “Love Sick,” began “Time Out of Mind.” The “Time out of Mind” songs revolved around a another Dylan drifter persona—world weary, older and devoted to love but acknowledging the pain love can cause. For the most part, the best songs on “Time Out of Mind,” and the two follow ups, featured the same narrator. Rimbaud, one of Dylan’s biggest influences, in his letters and best prose poems, speaks of the “I is Another,” essentially objectifying the self of the author, thus universalizing the personal. The dividing line between the subjective and the objective dissolves; the question of what is and isn’t autobiographical becomes mute. Rimbaud’s American contemporary and not accidentally another obvious influence of Dylan, Walt Whitman, while not as self-conscious as the Frenchman on the question of what is self, takes the same means to universalize a personal experience. Song of the Self is not about what is the self, but defines the self as part of the whole of Human Existence as well as Whitman’s 19th century American experience. We can see this same approach in scores of important works of literature—Delmore Schwartz, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg. Hemingway, with his Nick Adams stories uses a third person narrator as a stand in for the author, but those stories are likewise both autobiography and universal. A similar mechanism is at work in Kerouac, whether the narrator is Paradise or Dulouz. Robert Johnson epitomized the same approach in songwriting—who is the “I” in “Crossroads,” Robert Johnson or the persona that sings about the struggle of the dark night of the soul blues performers go through during the journeys between sin and salvation.

If the I in “Together Through Life” is the same person as the one we hear from on Blood on the Tracks and other Dylan works perhaps future scholars can debate. Enough similarities exist to make the case; all writers do sort of keep writing new variations on old themes. However, the persona wandering the desolate landscapes on “Together Through Life” is surely the same guy walking around in the previous three records. In many of the songs he wrote with Jerry Garcia, Hunter was adept at giving voice to the losers and down and outers who populate the Dead’s version of our invisible republic that is vaguely 19th century and a desolate, hard-scrabble and luckless landscape away from the urban centers of culture and commerce. Hunter is as fluent in the archaic language used in old folk songs as Dylan. Hunter’s contribution is seamless. The use of a first person narrator makes these songs immediate, intensifying the emotional impact. The songs feel personal, and that is an inventive accomplishment, and a rare one for the product of co-authorship.
“Hell is My Wife’s Hometown” takes its melody from “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” a Muddy Waters song written by Willie Dixon, whose estate is listed in the songwriting credit. Hidalgo’s accordion mimics the harmonica lines performed by the great Little Walter on the Muddy original, creating a spooky yet recognizable mood. Like most of these songs, it’s a crazy yarn, about the strange and destructive things love makes you do, starting off with “I didn’t come here to deal with a doggone thing/I just came here to hear the drop of simple rain,” soon the woman changes him - “She can make you steal, make you rob/Give you the hives, make you lose your job... One of these days I’ll end up on the run/I'm pretty sure she'll make me kill someone.” Still, the narrator declares, “My love for her is all I know,” and even though the “State’s gone broke, the county's dry” he is staying, although warning listeners, “Keep on walking, don’t be hanging around/I’m tellin you again that hell’s my wife’s home town.”

My favorite song on the album is “I Feel A Change Comin' On.” built around what sounds like a classic Dylan hook. It starts off with the narrator again, “I see my baby comin'/she's walking with the village priest.” I keep thinking, the priest is either advising her to marry this guy or to leave this guy. The guy is in love with this woman, but has another classic Dylan conflict, love vs. friendship. “We got so much in common/we strive for the same old ends/And I just can't wait/wait for us to become friends,” and in a really fun lyrical twist suggest to her, “If you wanna live easy/Baby, pack your clothes with mine.”

What seems to be open-ended is what happens to this couple. Of course, the open-ended story is not unknown to Dylan, and Hunter really mastered this device. The “plot” so to speak, is told through impressions, the case here – “Well now what's the use in dreaming/You got better things to do/Dreams never did work for me anyway/Even when they did come true.” Is she dreaming about marrying him or a better life that could be hers without him? We never find out, the song then veers into hilarious Dylan weirdness – “You are as porous as ever/Baby you can start a fire/I must be losing my mind/You're the object of my desire,” and then the way-out name checking: “I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver/And I’m reading James Joyce/Some people they tell me I got the blood of the land in my voice.”

What does this mean? He’s crazy to be in love, he acknowledges that that he is old and has a sense of wisdom, which I suppose one needs to appreciate both Shaver and Joyce. What exactly is the mind set? I don’t know, but perhaps exactly is the wrong way to look at a Dylan (or Hunter) lyric. It’s up to the listener to decide the state of affairs between the narrator and this woman he loves. What is unclear is how advanced is this relationship—does he want to have one, or do they have one and now it’s marriage or good bye? What is the village priest recommending, or since that image begins the yarn, is all this should I stay or should I go scenario just a projection the narrator is jumping to because he sees the gal talking with an authority figure and becomes romantically paranoid?

The concluding lyrics offer little clarification to the specifics, yet ties up the song nicely. We get a picture of the down and out, sad narrator. “Everybody got all the money/Everybody got all the beautiful clothes/Everybody got all the flowers/I don't have one single rose.” Not exactly the best candidate for marriage, certainly not somebody glad to see the local padre with his ‘baby’. He can’t offer the woman anything more than love. The chorus of the song –“I feel a change comin' on/and the fourth part of the day's already gone,” implies that things will soon be different. But what is that change, what will be the difference, that’s up to us and perhaps the song arrangement and the vocal delivery of the singer. After a romantic entanglement, Dylan characters often end up wiser, but alone “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” & “Tangled Up in Blue,” come to mind. The guys there wind up “walking down that lonesome road,” or “heading to another joint.” The “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” guy probably won’t leave the village, will continue to be shunned by the priest and stay alone, with his country music records and literary books.

The diversity of blues on the record include “If You Ever Go To Houston” a snappy blues shuffle, “Jolene,” a searing blues rocker and “Shake Mama Shake” that seems right out of Chess records, channeling a Chuck Berry melody. “It’s all Good” is a quasi-topical Dylan rocker that examines popular jargon It’s All Good and reveals the arrogance of that saying, which has seemed to permeate our lives. There’s a subtlety in the lyrics – “big politicians telling lies/restaurant kitchen filled with flies” – leaving the listener to surmise that with all these things so wrong, the only way everything can be ‘all’ good is to ignore and deny the world. It’s fitting that “It’s all Good” concludes “Together Through Life.” The central theme of the album may be the struggle for love, but for the poet, the world is not to be ignored and in fact, not denying the suffering and injustice in the world is part of the struggle of romantic love. After depicting the different romantic experiences in the twilight of his years that have occurred either in or on the way to this forlorn border town, the poet transcends his “self” and takes on the self-absorbed, media-drenched society we live in, and assails us for our false self-satisfaction that is blinding us to unfairness and misery, doing so with Dylan’s trademark bite of sardonic humor. He’s seen it all, he’s seen it before, he no longer lets it anger him but he is still compelled to give voice to those in distress and ridiculing those causing distress.

Dylan’s ragged voice—it has never sounded more raspy—second to perhaps the accordion, is the distinguishing feature of this album. He uses his phlegmatic death rattle in his phrasing, accentuating his world-weary attitude that accompanies his journey through the ultimate and timeless human dilemma—the secrets of the human heart.

Within his new hoarseness, Dylan also displays a rare warmth and affability. He weirdly laughs on “Hell is My Wife’s Home Town,” and busts out a heartfelt “whew!” to the band as it kicks it into gear on “It’s All Good.” This charming folksiness Dylan has heretofore only demonstrated on his marvelous Sirus Radio show or on his duet with Mavis Staples (and the Carter Family & Jimmy Rodgers tribute introduction) on the version of “Gonna Change My Way Thinkin,” on the “Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan,” a tribute album of a few years ago. Unlike the previous three albums, the lone narrator is more interested in the happiness—complex and often exists more in appearance than in substance—that comes from love than the despair, the love sickness, that love also can produce. Dylan is having a noticeably good time on “Together Through Life.”

It’s pretty hard to claim at this point Dylan is redefining his career. He’s done that a few times already, so many times that the redefinition is irrelevant. Few have had such a long and fruitful run—since about 1963—and he’s still writing and performing in ways that are challenging and uncompromising. The last twelve years or so has been one of his most sustained and richest periods of creativity. Not only did the new record premier at number one, but when he finally performed a song from it during his recent European tour—“If You Ever Go To Houston,” it was as the first encore, the spotlight slot of any performer. There’s a whole bunch of fans now more excited for new Dylan than to hear the legend’s latest rendition of “Like A Rolling Stone.”

Clearly, Dylan is having a lot of fun and he is expressing that fun with a refreshingly cordial wit. Rarely has he been so inviting, And, almost as rarely, he has an audience willing to be invited, willing to appreciate without precondition his latest muse. In the Tex-Mex spiced blues ballad, “This Dream of You,” he sings “in an all night cafe, as night turns into day.” Anyone who wants to be in that cafe is in that cafe and having a wonderful time.