DYLAN, SIMON CHOOSE
ARTISTIC GROWTH OVER NOSTALGIA
“What I’ve done, I’ve done all alone”, Bob Dylan said in a 1984 interview with Westwood One Radio. “But there are a lot of good songwriters of my era”.
“Like who, Bob?” The interviewer asked.
“Paul Simon has written some good songs”, Dylan said. “I think ‘America’ is a good song… ‘The boxer’… ‘Bridge over troubled water’… I mean, he’s written a lot of bad songs, too. But everybody’s done that.”
From Dylan, that’s as close as any songwriter gets to a fawning love letter. And now Dylan and Simon are uniting for the first time, crossing the country on that staple of summer concert season: a shed tour.
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Dylan and Simon are linked by history, of course. It’s arguable
that no two artist did more in the mid-‘60s to merge the energy and attitude of
rock’n’roll with the intellectual heft and social consciousness of folk music
(this isn’t to slight Simon’s former partner, but let’s face it: Art Garfunkel
was just an exceptionally pure-voiced backing singer, while Simon was the guy
writing timeless songs such as ‘The sounds of silence’).
Fans and critics continue to debate which camp has more right to claim these two musicians. In a recent essay in the New York Times, critic Billy Altman contended there was always more rock than folk in Dylan and Simon (the piece prompted several angry letters in response).
“Conventional wisdom has long held that Dylan and those who followed in his wake helped bring a previously unheard of sensibility to rock –a process that simultaneously helped electric music ‘grow up’ (by the end of 1966, rock’n’roll had evolved into rock) and sapped the lifeblood out of the folk movement”, Altman wrote. “As a result, it fell back on its most traditional elements and, 30-odd years later, has yet to recapture its power or focus (…) To understand the eclectic nature of the artists’ backgrounds is to begin to grasp precisely what made the folk movement of the ‘60s happen in the first place. What Dylan and his colleagues gave to folk music was rock’n’roll’s irrepressible sense of freedom –the freedom to express themselves in new and daring ways and the freedom to break tradition to do so.”
The argument holds that Dylan drew inspiration from the rebellious spirit and genre-defying attitudes of his favorite rockers –Fats Domino, Little Richard and Buddy Holly, even as he was busy learning the Woody Guthrie songbook as a young performer in Minneapolis’ Dinkytown, a few years prior to writing generational anthems such as ‘The times they are-a changin’’ and ‘Blowin’ in the wind’.
Simon was simultaneously making his debut as part of the Everly Brothers-style duo Tom and Jerry, though he was even more influenced by the earlier harmony singing of New York’s doo-wop groups. “The sounds of early rock’n’roll were sounds that I have been searching for in variations ever since”, Simon said in the liner notes to his 1993 box set. “This was not music from a white middle-class culture” (like, presumably, much of the folk music that dominated Greenwich Village stages as he began to wake his name as a performer).
Today both artists have dozens of songs from the ‘60s and ‘70s
forever enshrined in the rock canon: ‘Mrs. Robinson’, ‘Kodachrome’, ‘Still crazy
after all these years’, ‘Cecilia’, ‘Like a rolling stone’, ‘Mr. Tambourine man’,
‘I want you’, ‘Rainy day women number 12 & 35’, etc.
But perhaps the most encouraging thing about this pairing is the fact that, unlike so many of their rock peers, Simon and Dylan are both continuing to challenge themselves and their audiences as they attempt to grow and evolve as artists.
Place the live or recorded music of either man over the last decade alongside the output of, say, Paul McCartney or the Rolling Stones. There’s no comparison. Dylan acknowledge their pasts but constantly look forward, and there’s nary a hint nostalgia.
“Nostalgia is death”, Dylan has said.
Dense and moody, Dylan’s last album, ‘Time out of mind’, was his best new recording in the ‘80s or ‘90s. But his real forum has been onstage during his never-ending tours. Over the last five years in particular, he has consistently pushed his band toward creative, spontaneous reinterpretations of his songs, allowing his musicians the freedom to prod and surprise him.
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At the same time, Dylan has never seemed like a more assured and exciting guitar player, something for which he’s never gotten the proper credit. The source of this energy seems obvious: It ain’t no folkie up there, churning things up. At 59, Bobby Zimmerman is more of a rocker than ever.
Simon’s had a tougher time in the ‘90s, and he’s been less prolific. While Dylan turned inward to produce his best recent work, Simon travelled the globe. He follow spectacularly successful, South African-influenced ‘Graceland’ with the Brazilian-flavored 1990 album ‘The rhythm of the saints’.
‘Rhythm’ wasn’t received nearly as enthusiastically as ‘Gracealnd’,
but in retrospect, it can be seen as one of several steps toward opening the
United States to the South American sounds that are finally flowing in courtesy
of everyone from Tom Zé to Ricky Martin.%20Coors%20Amph.%2025%20jun..jpg)
Seven years after ‘Rhythm’, Simon gave us ‘Songs from The Capeman’, a companion to a play that has gone down as the ‘Ishtar’ or ‘Heaven’s gate’ in Broadway. Since I never saw it, I’ll avoid comment on the stage show, except to note that it was at least an ambitious attempt to tackle a new venue (and it was better than Lou Reed’s stab at the same).
The album, however, deserved much better than the public indifference that greeted it. In the music, at least Simon succeeded in reaching back to his earliest influences –doo wop choirs, Latino rhythms, jazz horns and acoustic instrumentation- to create a sound that was utterly fresh and contemporary. Lyrically it showed that stories of gangstas don’t have to be set to third-rate hip-hop backing tracks, nor do they have to revel in B-movie violence.
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