Why Bob Dylan Matters, Revised Edition by Richard F. Thomas

Author:Richard F. Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

8

Modern Times and the World’s Ancient Light: Becoming Homer

I’VE BEEN CONJURING UP ALL THESE LONG DEAD SOULS FROM THEIR CRUMBLIN’ TOMBS

—BOB DYLAN, “ROLLIN’ AND TUMBLIN’”

The release of Bob Dylan’s thirty-second studio album, Modern Times, on August 29, 2006, was attended by a sense of great anticipation from fans who were now reveling in Dylan’s third “classic” period. Twice before in Dylan’s career, peaks had descended to valleys—relatively speaking. John Wesley Harding, released in 1967, was and is a fine album, but it was not what those electrified by Blonde on Blonde from the year before had hoped for. Similarly, Desire, coming on the heels of the 1975 masterpiece Blood on the Tracks, is among Dylan’s best albums, but fails to attain the heights of what had come before. Would Modern Times point back in the direction of Under the Red Sky from 1990, and other materials out of whose ashes—again, relatively speaking—Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft” had risen? Or would what had been given back to Dylan—and to all of us—since 1997 keep on going? The latter proved to be the case, by near-universal assent. Rolling Stone pronounced the album Dylan’s “third straight masterwork,” and within two weeks Modern Times had topped the charts on the Billboard 200, the first Dylan album to do so in the thirty years that had passed since Desire hit that mark in 1976. Modern Times came out five years after “Love and Theft” and it would be another six before the 2012 masterpiece Tempest.

This might seem a very different pace than Dylan’s period from 1964 to 1966, when all those songs came tumbling out. But in the early 2000s, Dylan was doing much more than just writing songs. He’d cowritten and starred in the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous, a demanding, if hugely underrated, piece of work; in 2004 he’d published his bestselling memoir, Chronicles: Volume One; he was performing in concert at twice the rate that he had been in the sixties; he was painting and producing metal sculpture; and he recorded three seasons of his radio show Theme Time Radio Hour from May 2006 to April 2009. In 2008, moreover, he released The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs, a trove of unreleased and variant versions of his songs from 1989 to 2006. In hindsight, the passage of time is trivial given the enduring achievement of what these years have produced: Dylan’s music from the late twentieth and twenty-first century is a body of work that is comparable with that of any other period from Dylan’s, or any artist’s, career.

From the very beginning, the songs of Modern Times seemed rich in narrative texture, old and weary, mystical, musically varied, the songs alternately of a bluesman whose lyrics revealed the passing of time and of a highly poetic troubadour, still on the road after all these years. And these songs too take us back into another age. Even before the album came out, its title had piqued curiosity. Did

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