Liner Notables: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks - Page 2

Then an abrupt shift to Dylan erupts, as the topic hops: “Poor America. Tossed on a pilgrim tide. Land where the poets died. Except for Dylan.” But for the next five paragraphs Hamill is, despite Dylan’s reputation for repudiation, unnervingly building up a surviving spokesman for his generation with the larger-than-life imagery, as if he was Paul Bunyan emerged from the great north woods, a superhero with special powers or a mythic Greek god of inclement weather: “Dylan is the one who has most clearly taken the rolled sea and put it in a glass ... Early on, he warned us, he gave many of us voice, he told us about the hard rain that was going to fall…”

But the pump don’t work. Eventually, Hamill does fix what’s broken by bringing the universal down to the personal level:

And here is Dylan, bringing feeling back home. In this album, he is as personal and as universal as Yeats or Blake; speaking for himself, risking that dangerous opening of the veins, he speaks for us all. The words, the music, the tones of voice speak of regret, melancholy, a sense of inevitable farewell, mixed with sly humor, some rage, and a sense of simple joy.

Hamill makes a point of relating the reflective “If You See Her, Say Hello” containing its “love filled with honor, and a kind of dignity,” with contemporary history’s “moment at the end of wars” - and with his “right to speak of love, that human emotion that still exists, in Faulkner's phrase, in spite of, not because.”

As “If You See Her” is a simple song, so is the sprightly — as sprightly as Dylan gets — “Buckets of Rain,” with Hamill getting a lot out of a lot of thought-inducing drops adding up in life's bucket. After all, “Life is sad / Life is a bust / All ya can do / Is do what you must.” When life hand you lemmings, you don’t get in the car and follow them over the cliff. You head anywhere but: there’s no better restorative against resignation and disappointment in love and relationships than freedom and the highway and all that that evokes. “Buckets of Rain” is an ultimately hopeful song, then, for being

Not Dante's Inferno, and not intended to be. But a song which conjures up the American road, all the busted dreams of open places, boxcars, the Big Dipper pricking the velvet night. And it made me think of Ginsberg and Corso and Ferlinghetti, and most of all, Kerouac, racing Dean Moriarty across the country in the Fifties, embracing wind and night, passing Huck Finn on the riverbanks, bouncing against the Coast, and heading back again, with Kerouac dreaming his songs of the railroad earth. Music drove them; they always knew they were near New York when they picked up Symphony Sid on the radio. In San Francisco they declared a Renaissance and read poetry to jazz, trying to make Mallarme's dream flourish in the soil of America. They failed, as artist generally do, but in some ways Dylan has kept their promise.

When it comes to the two most anomalous songs on Blood on the Tracks, the blistering “Idiot Wind” and the long narrative and third-person chronicle of "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," Hamill has overarching associations for each to Dylan’s art and musical craftsmanship. Dylan knows that the idiot wind — whose “products live on the covers of magazines, in all of television, in the poisoned air and dead grey lakes” — blows through the human heart and “is the deadliest enemy of art.”

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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