Bob Dylan: What the Songs Mean by Michael Karwowski

Author:Michael Karwowski [Karwowski, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, Individual Composer & Musician
ISBN: 9781838597559
Google: Zca8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2019-11-08T23:26:33.289110+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Desire

The success of Blood on the Tracks, which was his second consecutive No. 1 album in the US in early 1975, re-established Bob Dylan as one of the pre-eminent artists of the ’70s, just as he had been of the ’60s, only this time there were no Beatles to steal his thunder. Appropriately, considering that Tracks was a re-treading of the train lines of Blonde on Blonde, that album also re-entered the US album chart, as did both his Greatest Hits albums. It seemed that the US public just couldn’t get enough of Bob Dylan, which made that summer an ideal time to release The Basement Tapes, which had been recorded back in 1967. The album created a bridge between the Dylan of the 1960s and that of the 1970s, something that the man himself was looking to achieve as he returned to his old haunts in Greenwich Village in the summer of ’75.

Bob Dylan’s return to Greenwich Village followed another return from a stay of several weeks in France whose high point had been spending his 34th birthday at a gypsy festival, a highly appropriate undertaking for someone in his restless state of mind at the time. As if to get back into the right frame of mind for a rediscovery of his career roots, he was also smoking heavily again and making a tentative step back to protest. This involved reading The Sixteenth Round, the autobiography of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a black boxer who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967 for a triple-murder that the media reported as a race killing. Dylan, convinced of his innocence, visited him in prison in New Jersey before taking up his case. In the event, Carter was re-convicted in 1976 following a re-trial and only finally released in 1985. Carter’s ordeal inspired the 1999 film, The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington, while Dylan, naturally, wrote a song to draw attention to the case.

“Hurricane” was one of 10 or so songs that Dylan co-wrote with Jacques Levy, a clinical psychologist, theatre director and lyricist who’d previously collaborated with The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. In fact, seven of the nine songs on Dylan’s next album, Desire, were co-written with Levy, who is probably best-known as the US director in 1969 of the spectacularly successful erotic review, Oh! Calcutta!, and as the lyricist for the stage version of the 1980 Alan Parker film musical, Fame.

Dylan and Levy spent days at a time in the summer of 1975 closeted away until they had a new song written. Dylan would also spend many nights “jamming” on stage in the Village with different musicians, and, in the process, slowly building up a band from scratch to take back out on the road. This would consist of old friends such as Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn, as well as new recruits such as violinist Scarlet Rivera, who Dylan reportedly spotted in a Village street with her violin before auditioning her in a rehearsal room nearby. In the spirit

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