The most revealing review of Bob Dylan's new album Tempest yet
Simon Cosyns looks at songwriter's new album Tempest,
inspired by James Cameron's hit blockbuster Titanic
The voice of a generation ... Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan - Tempest
Rating: 5/5
1. Duquesne Whistle
2. Soon After Midnight
3. Narrow Way
4. Long & Wasted Years
5. Pay In Blood
6. Scarlet Town
7. Early Roman Kings
8. Tin Angel
9. Tempest
10. Roll On John
FORGET all the “enigmatic genius” stuff, I’ve a sneaking suspicion that Bob Dylan is just an ordinary bloke at heart.
OK, books about his formative years recount a strict diet of outsiders like beat poet Jack Kerouac and protest balladeer Woody Guthrie.And, as his songs became more opaque and surreal in the mid-Sixties, listeners pinpointed the influence of 19th Century French poet and libertine Arthur Rimbaud.
Admittedly, interviews with the very private Dylan are as common as hen’s teeth (although a strange encounter in a darkened hotel room in Denmark springs to mind).
Yet at some point, this great voice of a generation, like millions of us the world over, must have sat down to watch an unerringly uncomplicated mainstream movie — James Cameron’s sentimental but entirely compulsive blockbuster, Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as Jack and Rose.
Whether he got through the full 194 minutes while munching on salted popcorn is anyone’s guess but I believe Dylan afforded himself a wry smile when Jack quoted directly from his two most famous songs.
“When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” says the film’s doomed hero at one point, picking up a line from Like A Rolling Stone.
“I’m just a tumbleweed ‘blowin’ in the wind,’” he explains earnestly another time.
Inspiration ... James Cameron's blockbuster Titanic
Therefore, it should come as no real surprise that the singer has returned the compliment to director and Dylan fan Cameron by:
a) Writing an outrageously OTT song about the Titanic, 100 years on from its sinking.
b) Including two references to a “Leo” in his vivid, sprawling tale of death and destruction.
And though the great ship went down on a calm and starry night, the 71-year-old has poured enough turmoil and misery into the song’s 14 minutes and 45 verses to call it Tempest and make it the title track of his astonishingly brilliant 35th studio album.
Debut ... Bob Dylan's self-titled first album in 1962
Released next week 50 years and six months after his self-titled debut, the album bristles with more energy than you’ll find in Russell Brand’s bedroom.
Again employing the tight, intuitive playing of his touring band, it continues Dylan’s rich vein of late-career form that began with 1997’s Time Out Of Mind and continued through Love And Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006) and Together Through Life (2009).
If anything, it trumps the lot of them for sheer lyrical and vocal power while managing to stretch the familiar old timey sonic palette in all sorts of unexpected ways. The song Tempest, part truth, part wild imagination, sets the Bob-slanted view of that fateful night of April 14th, 1912, to a handsome, addictive, accordion and fiddle-fuelled waltz.
It’s reasonably orthodox late Dylan but nothing quite prepares you for the slow, organ-backed album finale that follows.
Roll On John recalls the moment John Lennon died, shot in the back four times by Mark Chapman on December 8, 1980.
It’s a bruised but affectionate remembrance of the Beatle Dylan befriended in the mid-Sixties and, according to folklore, turned on to smoking cannabis. When you hear the song, you have to bear in mind that Lennon’s “I read the news today oh boy” is one of the defining opening lines in popular music.
Shipwreck ... Bob Dylan's track Tempest is about the Titanic sinking
It’s up there with Dylan’s “once upon a time you dressed so fine” from Like A Rolling Stone.
The Lennon lyric ushered in A Day In The Life, arguably the best song on The Beatles’ greatest album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
So it’s particularly touching to hear Dylan’s weathered rasp betraying genuine emotion when he sings “I heard news today oh boy” (note the slight misquote) as he reflects on the cruel loss of his kindred spirit.
It also feels as if Dylan is being quite forgiving here because Lennon didn’t always see eye to eye with him.
On the 1970 Plastic Ono Band track God, Lennon affirms: “I don’t believe in Zimmerman (Dylan’s real name)/I don’t believe in Beatles/I just believe in me/Yoko and me/And that’s reality.”
This attitude got more extreme when he took against Dylan’s late Seventies Born Again period and wrote a stinging riposte to Gotta Serve Somebody called Serve Yourself.
Now, with Roll On John, it’s plain that every word is meant sincerely and that Dylan still feels a rare kind of kinship with the Beatle. The world can be a lonely place if you’re set on such lofty pedestals as those two.
Aside from the two spectacular closing tracks, there’s so much more to Tempest.
Ode to Lennon ... Dylan's track Roll on John is about Beatle
There are two lengthy, storied folk songs that hark back to Dylan’s prosaic early compositions.
The bleak and brooding Scarlet Town is a companion piece to Barbara Allen, a traditional song about doomed love that the fresh-faced singer performed in the coffee shops of Greenwich Village. The lines “in Scarlet town where I was born” and “sweet William on his death bed lay” appear in both songs.
Then there’s the grim and gripping Tin Angel, nine minutes long with no choruses as it unravels a love triangle destroyed by treachery and revenge.
The blood-spattered song has the same relentless foreboding as Dylan’s early-Sixties works such as Hollis Brown or Seven Curses, which tell of hardship and hopeless existences and only end one way — in death. This one culminates in “all three lovers together in a heap, thrown into the grave forever to sleep”.
The 68-minute Tempest begins with Duquesne Whistle (pronounced doo-kayne), a rollicking retro blast in the grand tradition of train songs. It’s a kind of “all aboard!” call for the mad, bad journey that this album becomes.
On the face of it, second track Soon After Midnight is a lilting, countrified love song with a delightful opening couplet, “I’m searching for phrases to sing to your praises”.
But, like so many of these ten songs, it takes a sinister turn when he borrows from blues great Howlin’ Wolf to sing: “I’ve been down to the killing floors/I’m in no great hurry/I’m not afraid of your fury/I’ve faced stronger walls than yours.”
New album ... Tempest
Next up is Narrow Way, a sleazy, uncompromising rocker in the vein of Lonesome Day Blues from Love And Theft and packed with ear-catching lines. “I got a heavy-stacked woman with a smile on her face” and “ever since the British burned the White House down” are two that leap out.
One of the most affecting songs is the gospel-tinged, half-spoken Long And Wasted Years with Dylan’s wistful drawl calling to mind some Southern preacher man and bearing a similar vibe to an old unreleased Basement Tapes song of his called Sign On The Cross.
After Tempest’s title track and Roll On John, it’s fair to say the next most pivotal song is Pay In Blood, a mid-tempo Stonesy workout with the killer lyric “I pay in blood but not my own”.
And it seems appropriate to end with the grinding blues of Early Roman Kings with its “peddlers and meddlers”, “lecherous and treacherous”, “sluggers and muggers”.
For this song, above all, contains a line that sums up Dylan’s current attitude to life and why Tempest is such a magnificent beast of an album.
“I ain’t dead yet, my bell still rings.”
