A Moment of Panic

July-August 1974

Before the Flood (and what does that mean? A natural correlate to Planet Waves? Après moi le déluge?), the live album from the grand tour Bob Dylan and the Band made last winter, taped almost entirely on the last night, in Los Angeles, may turn out to be the least played Dylan record since Self Portrait. The press is that Dy­lan's singing is mannered and emotionless; that the music is sloppy and perfunctory; that the use of old songs is both a failed attempt to recreate a glorious past and an admission that Dylan cannot cre­ate in the present; that he no longer has any real relationship to the generation he helped recognize itself. It is said that at best the album is a substitution of physical energy for the imagination and innovation of better days.

Dylan's generation dissolved as its members grew up. Dylan, quite some time ago, turned his back on his putative generation, just as he abandoned the strictures of his old styles, and joined a bigger, more complex America. These days, anyone who writes about Dylan's audience as us is using a very ambiguous word, or a very outdated one. Dylan now performs as an American artist, not a generational symbol. John Wesley Harding was a deeply intellec­tual exploration of what it meant to be an American artist, ex­pressed in both words and music; Before the Flood offers not ideas but passions, and its ambitions are the same. The old context has crumbled—Paul Nelson is right when he says that in Dylan's new music the center will not hold, but the center is not in the music but in the country itself. The triumph of Dylan's new music is that Dylan seems to take the failure of the center—and, in terms of any our-generation, the failure of the edges—as an opportunity for freedom. If the failure is a fact, it is an exhilarating fact.

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This is what I hear. Since I saw Dylan and the Band on their tour, and since Before the Flood was released, I have had no interest in the new music as part of Dylan's history, or as a part of ours. Perhaps it's not the context that's shattered; perhaps it's the music itself that blows the context apart. But I care about this music as in­cident—I am intrigued by the simple aesthetic fact of six men on a stage saying their piece, and leaving.

When I listen to the radio today, I hear Paul McCartney, Elton John. At home I play Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic, Roxy Music's Stranded, and Roxy singer Bryan Ferry's strange new oldies album, These Foolish Things (he does "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"; he also does "It's My Party"). Before the Flood exposes the calculation of these records. They are so well-made, either in terms of simple production (Paul and Elton) or a whole vision of popular culture (Steely Dan, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry) that they leave almost no room for the listener to create. The tension between musicians and audience is proscribed; your responses have been figured out, and if the artist is good at his job, you go where he wants you to go.

There's nothing wrong with this. You get to a lot of interesting places. On one level, such means and ends are the essence of popu­lar art. Critics bowing to Alfred Hitchcock have been claiming for years that the perfection of manipulation is all there is to it. But great popular art, like great rock 'n' roll, takes an audience—and, since we are talking about popular art, ultimately the artist as well—to places the artist glimpsed only by instinct, if at all.

I feel many good things when I watch Hitchcock or listen to Bryan Ferry, but I never feel free. What I miss is the sense of open possibility, the exhilaration, one gets from Jules and Jim, Blonde on Blonde, or Weekend—the feeling that an artist is working over his head, that you are in over yours, that limits have been trashed. This kind of freedom—when you're in the presence of an artist lib­erating himself from his form, you feel free—makes Jules and Jim a much more dangerous movie than Shadow of a Doubt, just as Before the Flood is funnier and more painful than Ferry's These Foolish Things, which has had me laughing and misting up for months.

I miss the sense that there is more to music, or to an artist, to my­self, than I'd guessed, that when a song comes on the radio or goes on the turntable I can't predict what it will do to me. I miss the feel­ing of musicians diving into a performance without much idea of what route they are traveling, let alone of where they are going to come out, but with the good-humored, nervous conviction that the trip will return in surprise whatever it costs in uncertainty.

Dylan and the Band's music on Before the Flood was made in this spirit—a particularly American spirit. The best of it is brawling, crude, not completely civilized, an old-fashioned, back-country, big-city attack on all things genteel. There's a lot of Whitman's YAWP in this music. "The European moderns," D. H. Lawrence wrote fifty years ago, "are all trying to be extreme. The great Amer­icans I mention" (Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman) "just were it."

I listened seriously, carefully, and constantly to this album, not enjoying it particularly, feeling put off by what seemed to be a one-dimensional, overly straightforward performance, until in the middle of "Highway 61 Revisited," right where Dylan is singing "Do you know where I can get rid of these things?" I caught Rob­bie Robertson tossing off two little noises—Awk! Awk!—and then flipping back to the main drift of the song with a combination of notes unlike anything I had ever heard. I couldn't believe it—he made it obvious that every other guitar player in America has webbed fingers—or that he has twelve. So I called him up, to find out how this music was made, how the riff was worked into place, what its purpose was in the structure of the song, and so on. "Yes," he said. "A moment of panic."

That moment made the album for me, opened it up: panic per­haps, but no accident, because now I could cite dozens of moments like it. Those few notes cracked the textures of the music, provided a way into its density. Within those textures are a fabulous collec­tion of nuances, phrases, lyric fragments, pieces that seem to mat­ter more than finished songs. Pieces shoot out of a song you've heard dozens of times and make new claims on your ability to re­spond. The music may be all familiarity on the surface (old songs), or beneath the surface (bought the album, took it home, played it), but you never get to the bottom. The sound of the recording—rough, blurry, fast, dark—hides the action at first, and may even make some tunes sound bland. After a time, strange incidents be­gin to poke through, all the more powerful because you were sure they weren't there. Then everything falls into place. A few days later you hear something different; the performance shatters; it re­builds itself around that moment, and shifts again.

This kind of freedom—six men running wild within a structure that still keeps its shape, that is never incoherent or arbitrary—seems to be what is authentically new about this music, as well as what is best about it. The density of the music creates new space; I hear Garth Hudson as the star of this record, just as I heard Levon Helm as the star of the show. Neither man would have played with the fire he did without Dylan driving him past himself; that Garth Hudson can overshadow Dylan here is the album's success, not its failure.

The Band didn't play this way with Dylan when they toured as the Hawks in 1965 and '66, nor have they played this way on their own since. In the past, they backed Dylan, and he sang as if that was just how he wanted it. The coverage of the recent tour fell into these expectations. Writers spoke often of the excellent "fills" Robbie, Garth, and Richard Manuel provided, or the fine rhythms Levon Helm and Rick Danko came up with. Before the Flood makes such commentary ridiculous. Garth handles the rhythm; some­times Levon seizes the story. There are whole songs in what Garth does on "Highway 61 Revisited," in Levon's drumming on "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)"—complete, crazily in­tricate versions of what these songs are all about.

The performance is so rough it makes the Rolling Stones' live music sound polite, and yet the music Dylan and the Band make to­gether is more complex, in an emotional sense, than the lyrics of the songs that are being played. This freedom—the way that the singers and musicians have freed themselves from the songs as arti­facts—has something to do with the fact that Dylan and the Band are older than they were when they first played this music; they have less to prove to each other and more to say for themselves. They can take their partnership for granted, and build on it. They can be thrilled by the crowd and forget it, all at once.

Listen to the original version of "Highway 61 Revisited," from the album of the same name, made back in 1965; you hear a very laconic Bob Dylan, a dandy, casually describing events of incredi­ble strangeness, as if to say, Well, what else would you expect from a place like the U.S.A.? But on Before the Flood it's a different story. You wouldn't believe what's happening on Highway 61, the singer is saying—and we're going to take you out and show you, whether you're ready or not.

Once, Bob Dylan cruised the strip with a cool eye, keeping his distance. Now, he's right in the middle, and so are we. You hear Garth Hudson waltzing you down the road, making you feel as if it's going to be a pleasant, Tom Sawyer sort of trip, and then sud­denly he's calling down from the mountain, Gabriel bent on Judg­ment Day, and yes, you'd better run, if only to keep up. That is the burden of joining a bigger, more mysterious America, of abandon­ing the comforts of my-generation. And to enter the center that will not hold, to affirm it, to do one's work there—that is not, I think, a harmless act.

Dylan's tour with the Band was not an event, regardless of what Newsweek and Rolling Stone said, regardless that whole books on the tour are in the stores; as an event, the tour vanished in its own smoke. Elton's John's Caribou and Before the Flood were released simultaneously; Caribou is already number one, while Dylan and the Band are not even in the top twenty. Apparently the 450,000 people who came to see the show do not even need a souvenir.* Asylum must have believed its own hype, because they put Before the Flood on the market without ads. Now, hysterically, they are adding more hype: "The greatest tour in rock and roll history . . ."

Nonsense. Unlike Dylan's tours in the mid-sixties, the Band's debut in the spring of 1969, the Rolling Stones' climactic dash across the continent later that year, or Elvis's first appearances on television in 1956, this tour did not draw in the desires and fears and symbols that changed and deepened the public life we share through performers who matter to us. Dylan's tour was an opportu­nity for music, a chance for six people to break through the limits with which they'd surrounded themselves. Together, they pulled that off, and within the music they made and left behind on record, there is a chance for any fan to break through some of his or her own limits. Most other music will sound careful, hedged, and a bit false after Before the Flood—that may be why I haven't heard a sin­gle cut from the album on the radio since it was released.

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Bob Dylan, Before the Flood (Asylum, 1974).

___. the bootleg series volume 4—Bob Dylan Live 1966—The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert (Columbia, 1998).

*Before the Flood eventually reached #3 on the Billboard charts.

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Originally published in City, July 24-August 6, 1974 with Dylan/Band, Village Voice, August 15, 1974