Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America by Tom Piazza

Author:Tom Piazza [Piazza, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Music, Writing
ISBN: 9780062008220
Google: HWcQK3M7LxAC
Amazon: 0062008226
Goodreads: 11838698
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2011-08-22T12:00:00+00:00

4.

Nobody knows what really goes on for an artist. It’s presumptuous to think you can, any more than you can know what really goes on inside somebody else’s marriage. Unlike elements are engaged in a constantly evolving dialogue.

“I don’t know who I am most of the time,” Dylan told David Gates in a 1997 Newsweek interview. “It doesn’t even matter to me. . . . I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. . . . I believe the songs.” In the interview he was speaking specifically about gospel songs, but it is no stretch to imagine that it also applies to the whole body of folk- and blues-based music that informed his work. The songs gave him a text to go on, a Holy Book containing not an orthodoxy but a kind of anti-orthodoxy in which the most disparate elements were all given space at the table. In the mid-1990s he started appearing onstage dressed like the reincarnation of Hank Williams. It may not be too much to say that his intense reconnection to the traditional material at that point amounted to a kind of secular conversion, a renewal and realigning of what was of value, what was necessary, and what was possible.

Parallel things had happened previously in his career, of course. After arriving in New York City in 1961 as the hobo angel boy from everywhere, performing traditional material and then infusing it with more and more of his own inner light and darkness, the wheels stopped in 1966; he went back to the basics with the material that came to be called the Basement Tapes and came out with John Wesley Harding. The process began again, and then toward the end of the 1970s the wheels stopped again and he came out with Slow Train Coming. One could say that the subsequent Infidels, and its outtakes, bears the same relation to Slow Train as Highway 61 Revisited bore to The Times They Are A-Changin’—the calculus of doubt and conflict and irony and corrosive anger and livid imagery supplanting the algebra of faith and direct statement. As if Dante had started the Divine Comedy in the Paradiso, or at least the Purgatorio, and ended in the Inferno.

Whether there is a causal relation or not, Dylan’s live performances began pulling together sharply in the year or so after World Gone Wrong came out in 1993, and he also began work on the material that would comprise two of the best records he ever made, Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft.

Dylan cited his sources for the World Gone Wrong songs in the disc’s booklet; the sources for the Good as I Been to You songs have been discussed in print with varying degrees of accuracy. In Behind the Shades Revisited, Clinton Heylin quotes Ian Andersen, the editor of something called Folk Roots, as writing that there is “no shadow of a doubt” that “the rich old has-been” (that would be

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