Bob Dylan by Jonathan Cott

Author:Jonathan Cott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

17.

Is it so surprising I’m on the road? What else would I be doing in this life—meditating on the mountain? Whatever someone finds fulfilling, whatever his or her purpose is—that’s all it is.”

* * *

Interview with Jonathan Cott, Rolling Stone

November 16, 1978

On the evening of September 15th, the Boston Red Sox were in New York City trying to get back into first place. In New Orleans, just before Muhammad Ali made his comeback, TV commentator Howard Cosell introduced the fighter by quoting from the song “Forever Young”: “May your hands always be busy,/May your feet always be swift,/May you have a strong foundation/When the winds of changes shift.” And in Augusta, Maine, the composer of that song was inaugurating a three-month tour of the United States and Canada that will include sixty-five concerts in sixty-two cities.

According to an Associated Press review of the opening night, Bob Dylan “drove a packed-house audience of 7,200 into shrieks of ecstasy. The thirty-seven-year-old folk-rock singer mixed old songs and new. His audience in the Augusta Civic Center was a mixture of people who first knew Dylan as an angry young poet in the early Sixties and high-school students more accustomed to punk rock. Dylan satisfied both, although his veteran fans seemed the happiest.”

After a highly successful series of concerts in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and western Europe earlier this year, it might seem peculiar to think of Dylan’s latest American tour as a kind of comeback. But, at least in this country, Dylan recently has been the recipient of some especially negative reviews, both for his film, Renaldo and Clara (which, incidentally, was warmly greeted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival), and his latest album, Street-Legal. This billingsgate, moreover, has come from a number of Dylan’s “veteran fans.” In the Village Voice, seven reviewers—a kind of firing squad—administered justice to the film with a fusillade of abuse. And Rolling Stone, in its two August issues, featured a column and review that pilloried the album.

Yet Street-Legal seems to me one of Dylan’s most passionate, questing and questioning records. It presents two songs of ironic and bittersweet explanations and resolutions (“True Love Tends to Forget” and “We Better Talk This Over”); a song of waiting and searching (“Señor”); a song of black magic (“New Pony”); a song of need (“Is Your Love in Vain?”); a song of pleading (“Baby Stop Crying”); a song of the stripping bare of personality (“No Time to Think”); a song of loss and encounters (“Where Are You Tonight?”); and a song that combines medieval romance, Tarot dreams and a Palace of Mirrors in which each image is seen as if on a different floor (“Changing of the Guards”). Street-Legal reflects the night and day sides of Dylan’s art and personality—the last three songs mentioned being among the singer’s most complex lunar landscapes (illumined with imagination, intuition and magic), the first two radiating with the solar attributes of intellection and objectivity—while the other songs hover around like mysterious satellites.

Dylan recorded this album

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