The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: World Gone Wrong
December 1993
For the second time in less than a year, Bob Dylan has released an unproduced, acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica collection of traditional blues and folk songs. A small voice from the sidelines—even the wilderness—World Gone Wrong (Columbia) will likely make itself felt. In its own quiet manner it traces the renunciations of fame, responsibility, and authority that Nirvana tries and fails to enact on In Utero. The only real kin to Dylan's record in the jumble of end-of-the-year product may be PJ Harvey's almost embarrassingly naked 4-Track Demos (Island/PLG), the great album her Dry and Rid of Me only seemed to be.
If Dylan's new work does make itself felt, though, it may take a while. The 1992 Good as I Been to You was Dylan's most striking music since... since the last time he cut the ground out from under your feet, whenever that was; it stopped at number fifty-one on the Billboard charts and didn't make the Village Voice national critics poll chart at all. Their loss: Dylan came to life in the old clothes of “Canadee-i-o,” “Little Maggie,” “Froggie Went a Courtin’.” As he does on World Gone Wrong, he came to life as a singer on Good as I Been to You; then as now, as a singer, in the hesitations and elisions of his phrasing, he came to life as a philosopher.
On both records, the music is all about values: what counts, what doesn't, what lasts, what shouldn't. The performance is modest, but anything but casual. Finding the fatalism—the foreboding—in the ancient, twisting modal melodies of “Love Henry” and “Jack-a-Roe” on World Gone Wrong, the way he did with “Jim Jones” and “Blackjack Davey” on Good as I Been to You, as a philosopher Dylan comes to life as a gatekeeper, a guardian. “I have to think of all this as traditional music,” he said in 1966. “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels—they're not going to die. It's all those paranoid people who think that someone's going to come and take away their toilet paper—they're going to die. Songs like ‘Which Side Are You On?’ and ‘I Loves You, Porgy’—they're not folk-music songs; they're political songs. They're already dead.”
This is precisely the talk Dylan talks in the liner notes to World Gone Wrong, where he says where the songs on the album come from and explains what they are about. “What attracts me to the song,” he writes of “Lone Pilgrim” (the only composition on World Gone Wrong legally credited to a named author, as opposed to a blues or folk progenitor), “is how the lunacy of trying to fool the self is set aside at some given point. salvation & the needs of mankind are prominent & hegemony takes a breathing spell.” Regarding “Stack A Lee,” archetypal tale of the black outlaw and perhaps the best-known number on World Gone Wrong, “what does the song say exactly? it says no man gains immortality thru public acclaim. truth is shadowy... the song says that a man's hat is his crown. futurologists would insist it's a matter of taste.” On Blind Willie McTell's “Broke Down Engine”: “it's about variations of human longing—the low hum in meters & syllables. it's about dupes of commerce & politics colliding on tracks... it's about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite, flood control—watching the red dawn not bothering to dress.”
Dylan is claiming absolute and infinite meaning for the songs he's now singing. The challenge is to hear in these songs even a fraction of what he hears: whether it's McTell's 1931 “"Broke Down Engine” or Dylan's; Dylan's “Blood in My Eyes” or the Mississippi Sheiks' 1931 original; William Brown's 1942 “Ragged & Dirty” or Dylan's.
Dylan hears a whole world, a complete millenarian drama, in every tune; the person who buys this record, takes it home, puts it on, is going to hear a small-time drama into which intimations of the uncanny (“roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese”) occasionally, inexplicably intrude. “Ragged & Dirty,” a sly blues, is first of all carnal; the way Dylan slides into the tune, barely speeding the pace, is a one-verse seduction. “Stack A Lee” is quickstep true crime, graveyard humor: “Taken him to the cemetery, but they failed to bring him back.” But Dylan hears as much mysticism in these tunes as he does politics in “Love Henry,” where a parrot bears witness against its murdering mistress.
The way into the music is through Dylan's singing. Listen as hard as you can to that, let words or scenes emerge as they do or don't, and the depth at which Dylan is working may become patent, sensual, something you can touch.
In “Blood in My Eyes,” a man is trying to get something going with a prostitute. The weariness, the fear of humiliation, the despair in the man's voice as he describes the situation, the way he hopes to get what he wants is almost too painful. Only that moment when he drifts out of the dollars and cents of the day's concern, and drifts into the chorus, “Got blood in my eyes/For you,” is sweet. It's so sweet, summoning up a desire so plainly outside the realm of fulfillment, that the man's loneliness overwhelms anything else he might bring into his life. And yet, when you're as lonely as Dylan has now made this man—as he's made you—you'll bring anything into your life in an attempt to turn that isolation into something else: a strange adventure in a foreign land, a lover's murder, God's kiss.
As World Gone Wrong plays, with Dylan's scratchy, seemingly disdainful voice quickly growing full, earnest, urgent, then delicate, all these things do turn into one another. The music traces a circle from which there need be no exit. And if you take Dylan's cue and hunt down the originals of the songs as he names them—the Mississippi Sheiks' “Blood in My Eyes” (on Complete Recordings, Vol. 3 [Document]) or Doc Watson's “Lone Pilgrim” (on The Watson Family [Smithsonian Folkways])—you might find a certain discontinuity between the versions. The older singers often sound eager to please; Dylan doesn't. He sounds like his goal has been to get all the way into these old songs, and then get lost.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, December 1993
"And yet, when you're as lonely as Dylan has now made this man—as he's made you—you'll bring anything into your life in an attempt to turn that isolation into something else: a strange adventure in a foreign land, a lover's murder, God's kiss."
Marcus and Dylan takes these old songs more seriously than their authors but find a way to make this more homage, a sign of respect rather than condescension.