Dylan's second most
prolific period.'
Planet Waves (1974)
by Bob Dylan
‘We have much to talk about
And much to reminisce,
It sure is right
On a night like this.’
(On A Night Like This)
The original title for this album was to be ‘Ceremonies Of The Horsemen’, a vague but evocative phrase
drawn from the 1965 love song for Dylan’s first wife, Sarah (‘Love Minus Zero /
No Limit’). Then again, his monochromatic painting on the front cover bears two
other legends: ‘Moonglow’ and ‘Cast-Iron Songs & Torch Ballads’. I believe
either of these would have been an improvement on the abandoned title or its
equally vague replacement.
Nothing much is revealed from gazing at the three heavily
daubed figures huddled in the picture – one, or all of them may resemble Dylan
and might represent a gathering of selves ready for the journey ahead, back out
into the hurly-burly of the world of
performing and touring after more than three years of relative inactivity. The
four motifs in the picture: an anchor, a heart on a sleeve, a CND symbol and
what looks like a lantern, resonate with themes arising from the songs, the
painting itself and the artist’s somewhat breathlessly scribbled liner note on
the back cover.
I won’t attempt a literary analysis of this other than to
mention that it is pretty much of a piece with Dylan’s other sleeve-notes
(apart from the unexpectedly crude references to ‘bar stools that stank from
sweating pussy’ and ‘space guys off-duty with big dicks’). A nostalgia for what
he calls ‘the gone world’ chimes with some of the songs and the opening
proclamation, ‘Back to the Starting Point!’ cuts two ways: the walk down Memory Lane
For Planet Waves marks
not only Dylan’s first proper album since 1970 – and the first of his brief
sojourn on the Asylum label before returning to Columbia for good a year later
– but also his commitment to play live again, which , apart from the odd
guest-spot, he hasn’t done since 1966.
So this record was a catalytic release. It provided the impetus for Dylan’s second
most prolific period, starting a run of seven studio albums in less than eight
years and did well on the charts reaching #1 in the US
and #7 in the UK
Well, to begin with, it stands in the immediate and very
long shadow cast by the album which followed it just a year later, the rightly
celebrated Blood On The Tracks.
Then, critics nitpicked about the
production sound and have tended to skim over it on their way to discussing the
massively successful comeback tour with The Band - as encapsulated in the live
album, Before The Flood - all of
which took place in 1974, with Blood
On The Tracks straining at the leash for release the following January.
Dylan was busy being born,
shaking the dust off his feet and not looking back. Apart from ‘Forever Young’, which
was the only song from the album he was still playing as the tour reached its
end, he has only very rarely included selections from Planet Waves in his numerous concerts down the years. Neither has
he remarked upon the record much in interviews beyond a few throw-away comments
in the booklet which accompanied the Biograph
(1985) compilation (i.e. ‘On A Night Like This’ – ‘not my type of song, I
think I just did it to do it’; ‘You Angel You’ - ‘sounds to me like dummy
lyrics’; ‘Forever Young’ – ‘I wrote it thinking about one of my boys…not
wanting it to be too sentimental…the lines…were done in a minute…the song wrote
itself.’).
The critics' grumbling about the supposedly slipshod production of the record - it was apparently helmed by Rob Fraboni, assisted by Robbie Robertson and probably Dylan himself - need not concern us here. Suffice to say that, compared to the
glitzy bounce of those contemporaneous trends of Glam Rock and Disco, Planet Waves probably does seem
a rather low-key affair, but that never spoilt my appreciation of it - and it almost certainly won't affect yours either.
When we consider the eleven songs
on the album, we find all but one of them to be love songs, more or less: romantic,
sexual, marital, paternal and unrequited love. The song that failed to make the
cut, ‘Nobody ‘Cept You’ (which later appeared on The Bootleg Series 1-3) is another one. It apparently worked well
live but was never nailed in the studio. The out-take features Robbie Robertson
pottering around on the wah-wah pedal to no great effect. Robertson’s playing
on the official tracks however, is beyond reproach.
This, incidentally, is the only
Dylan album that The Band play on as a unit apart from the live album that
followed it and The Basement Tapes
(1975) which came out
the next year but were,
of course, recorded much earlier. They knit together the fabric of the songs
in a way that is both tight and subtle. ‘On A Night Like This’, though, is
mainly about Dylan’s harmonica playing which, unusually, operates not merely as
the lead instrument but as constant thread dubbed behind the vocals. Zipping
smartly in to get the record underway, it’s a simple but highly effective
starter which rides the lyrical conceit of lovers making hot whoopee beside a
log fire, whilst outside in the snow, ‘the four winds blow / Around this old
cabin door’.
This upbeat mood is promptly
arrested by the cautionary ‘Going, Going, Gone’, the album’s only non-love
song. Here we find the narrator ‘at the top of the end…closin’ the book’ and
determined to ‘cut loose / Before it gets too late’. This can be tellingly
interpreted as Dylan resolving to come out of semi-retirement, make music again
and hit the road. And what music! Richard Manuel’s piano carries the rhythm
with Garth Hudson’s organ whispers eerily in the background, but it’s
Robertson’s climbing, spindly notes and plunging accent chords that truly
compliment Dylan’s terrific vocal. He is grimly set on a course and ‘don’t
really care / What happens next’. The rising bridge urges him to ‘follow your
heart’ but also warns ‘Don’t you and your one true love ever part’.
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| Mr. & Mrs. Dylan with Mr. & Mrs. Cash |
It’s a great song and one of
Dylan’s best of the period. Naturally, it has been seen to implicitly reference
his then wife, Sarah, and her fairly well known doubts and fears about his
re-entering the rock and roll fray. However much those of us who write about
Dylan should heed his oft-repeated scorn at the idea of hanging his songs from
the branches of what is known or surmised about his life, there are certain
songs which are reasonably unambiguous. I think this is one of those songs
(and, of course, ‘Sarah’, from Desire
(1976), less contentiously, would be another).
Is the next song, ‘Tough Mama’,
also ‘about’ Sarah? Well, epithets like ‘Sweet Goddess’ and ‘Silver Angel’
match the rather cloying terms like ‘Radiant Jewel’ and ‘Scorpio Sphinx’ which
I feel slightly undermine the otherwise eloquent Desire song.
Anyway, whoever ‘Tough Mama’ is,
Dylan tells her in the third verse that ‘you know who you are and where you’ve
been’. The hyperbole above is also offset by a lyrical flash which brings the
sleeve-note back to mind when the weather is described as ‘a-hotter than a
crotch’…The lyric, which, but for those epithets, might almost come from Highway 61, seeks to persuade the woman
to stick by him and, in the song’s last line, meet him ‘at the border late
tonight’ (where, presumably, the tour-bus awaits). Musically it’s a rollicking track with The Band’s fine ensemble
backing Dylan’s raucous harmonica. Robert Christgau probably had this track in
mind when he grinningly refers to the ‘scrawny, cocky…stray cat music’ to be
found in parts of the album.
So who might ‘Hazel’ be then,
with her memorably ‘dirty blonde hair’ and ‘stardust in her eye’? An old flame
from way back when, maybe? Who cares? It’s a wonderful little love song,
elevated by the warm, wistful vocal and another soaring bridge (listen to the
way Dylan sings ‘up on a hill’). Perhaps the key point here is that Hazel is
‘goin’ somewhere and so am I’.
Whoever the woman is in
‘Something There Is About You’, she makes Dylan nostalgic for his pre-fame past
and ‘brings back a long-forgotten truth’:
‘Thought
I’d shaken the wonder and the phantoms of my youth
Rainy days on the Great Lakes,
walkin’ the hills of old Duluth
Naturally, critics have seized
upon this almost Wordsworthian couplet because of its frank mention of Dylan’s
home town (he ‘who’s so good with words and at keeping things vague’ as Joan
Baez put it in her great song about him, ‘Diamonds & Rust’). The woman in
this song also seems to have saved him from the vertiginous and excessive
stardom of his past:
‘I
was in a whirlwind, now I’m in some better place’
He’s grateful but not grateful
enough to ‘promise to be faithful’. It’s a hard, honest admission and anchors
this torch-song with chilling cast-iron. Musically, Dylan again leads The Band
with strong vocal and harmonica performances although the pretty melody doesn’t
go anywhere much.
And so to ‘Forever Young’ - so
good they included it twice. Then there are three other official versions: a
solo acoustic rendition from Biograph; a version with The Band on their
valedictory live album, The Last Waltz
(1978); and another live cut from Bob
Dylan At Budokan (1979). All of these have much to
recommend them but, of the five, my favourite is probably the Last Waltz
one with Robertson pulling out all the stops, his stratocaster
stratospherically epic).
It is the big song on Planet Waves and one which his audiences will
always crave to hear - along with ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and ‘Like A Rolling
Stone’ et al. In a 2005 poll of musicians and house writers on ‘Mojo’ magazine,
‘Forever Young’ is the only track
from Planet Waves to figure in their Top 100 Dylan songs (albeit at only # 44…).
Dylan’s poet pal, Allen Ginsberg
loved it, recommending it as a latter-day national anthem for America
‘God’ is only mentioned once, at
the outset, and the song has none of the rather tedious, unpleasant religiosity
that blighted parts of the so called ‘born again trilogy’ of albums a few years
down the line. In fact, ‘Forever Young’, a hymn of hope, has more in common
with the lovely little chant, ‘Father Of Night’, the hymn of praise which ends
his previous studio album, New Morning
(1970).
When you turned the original
record over you found a reprise of ‘Forever Young’, this time in a jaunty,
hoedown tempo. I liked it well enough although thought it something of a
makeweight. Ideally, a more simpatico take of ‘Nobody ‘Cept You’ might have
made for a stronger programme, but one has to say that the sequencing on Planet Waves is nicely symmetrical. As
on the first side, a cheerful, lively opener is followed by a much slower,
darker proposition.
‘Dirge’ was, confusingly, titled
‘Dirge For Martha’ to begin with – quite who she might have been, no-one seems to know. It features just Dylan
on piano and Robertson splintering notes out on an acoustic guitar. Dylan's ability on the piano may
be only rudimentary, but he can be a highly effective player - as
here, and Robertson’s playing is yet again exactly right, echoing the
frustration and spite of the words. The song makes most sense to me when I hear
Dylan’s powerful vocal addressing not a woman, not Sarah (let alone the
mysterious Martha), but some personification of the gaping maw of stardom
opening up before him once more as he prepares to put himself back in the
market place. It might – more shakily – be compared to ‘Dear Landlord’ from John Wesley Harding (1967), a song
probably addressed to his manager, Albert Grossman. Whoever or whatever the
song is aimed at, its final couplet, is a telling admission of how bitterly
conflicted Dylan must have been feeling when he wrote ‘Dirge’:-
‘Lady
Luck, who shines on me, will tell you where I ’m at
I hate myself
for loving you, but I should get over that.’
‘You Angel You’ is another fine ensemble performance and one of the catchiest tracks. It may have been written with an eye on the chart and was released as the flip side of ‘On A Night Like This’, the lead single from the album which disappeared without trace, despite the perceived commercial appeal of both songs. ‘Dummy lyric’, or not, it might, with a country arrangement, have fitted snugly on
‘Never Say Goodbye’, like most of the songs here, gets by without recourse to a conventional verse-chorus structure. A short song – there are no sprawling epics on this album – it is propelled by the rhythm section of Rick Danko on bass and Levon Helm on drums, and is over almost before you know it. It begins with this haunting verse:-
‘Twilight on
the frozen lake,
A north wind
about to break
On footprints
in the snow
And silence
down below’
The elemental geography of his Minnesota past is evoked again (that ‘twilight’ and ‘silence’ has stayed with me ever since I first heard it all those years ago) but, to be honest, the rest of the song, lovely listening experience that it is, fails to really live up to its opening. By Dylan’s standards, it proceeds as a fairly conventional love song, although the final verse fleetingly raises the ghosts of a couple of his earlier classics (‘Girl Of The North Country’ and It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’) before fading away.
As the first half of the record ended with a love song for his children, so the second leaves us with a love song for his wife (well, hey, say I’m naive, but it is called ‘Wedding Song’…). It’s Dylan down to the bone, just him on acoustic guitar and harmonica, playing and singing in that uniquely authoritative way of his.
‘It’s never
been my duty to remake the world at large,
Nor is it my
intention to sound the battle charge’
Back on Side One however, he has also told her that his ‘hand’s on the sabre’ although he may be willing to let her call the tune because she has ‘picked up the baton’ (‘Something There Is About You’). There seems to be a kind of desperation abroad here, amidst all the affirmation, and he fears that her love ‘burns him to the soul’ and cuts him ‘like a knife’. And yes, he loves her ‘more than blood’, but listen to the way he sings that phrase and you realise just how close we are to the most famous break-up record in the history of popular music. Blood On The Tracks waits in the wings, its wounds perhaps already opening up by the end of its predecessor.
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| One of Barry Feinstein's series of shots of Dylan with local kids in the streets of Liverpool, 1966. |
* * * *
Here’s how underrated Planet Waves is: Robbie Robertson, who
as this article makes clear, is, after Dylan himself, the key musician on that
record (and although no producer is named on the album, Robertson is credited
with ‘Special Assistance’) was featured in the music press promoting a new
album and looking back over his career. As I was at the time, in the middle of
writing this piece, I checked out three of the quality magazines, ‘Mojo’, ‘Uncut’
and ‘The Word’. What I found was that Robertson’s stroll down Memory Lane
Perhaps Robertson didn’t want to
remind readers of an album that he helped to produce, but which has been
criticised for its sound. After all, the critics have told us that you can
actually hear Dylan’s jacket button scratching against his guitar on the first
and only take of ‘Wedding Song’ - at least, you might be able to if you’re zeroing
in through Bang & Olufsen speakers and headphones.
N. B.
A fuller review of this album - and others - has already appeared in my article, 'Much To Reminisce; Bob Dylan's Most Underrated Albums' which was originally published in ISIS (issue 156 ), the international journal of all things Dylan. It can also be found in the 'Other Prose' section of this Angles & Reflections blog.
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