Tag Archives: altrockchick

Rilo Kiley – More Adventurous – Classic Music Review

I’ve had this sucker near the top of my to-do list for years. Every time my eyes lighted upon More Adventurous, my first reaction was “Oh yeah, gotta do that one.” What stopped me was my second response: “Ugh.”

The “ugh” reaction has nothing to do with my opinion of the album, which is actually quite favorable. The “ugh” comes from the happenstance that More Adventurous came out in 2004, during a period in my life that I’d rather forget. I should note here that none of the other albums I picked up that year trigger the “ugh” reaction. Not Underachievers Please Try Harder. Not Franz Ferdinand. Not Half Smiles of the Decomposed.

American Idiot definitely triggers the “ugh” reaction, but I didn’t buy that record. I think Green Day sucks.

And the “ugh” reaction to that highly overrated album is different than the one sparked by More Adventurous. This “ugh” is accompanied by a sinking feeling in my stomach because the album forces me to remember just how fucked-up a human being I was during that period.

Baby, I was bad news personified.

Rilo Kiley began life as one of the many indie bands that popped up around the turn of the century, freely following their musical instincts and hoping to make enough money to get by. Their early music might be described as a triangulation of twee, rock and country with greater instrumental diversity than your typical indie band, accompanied by irreverent, uncensored lyrics in accordance with looser millennial norms. They released an EP and two independently labeled and marketed albums. Each subsequent release showed more promise than its predecessor, but the challenges inherent in independent distribution (limited marketing resources, mainly) restricted their access to a broader audience.

For More Adventurous, the band decided to try something different: publish the album under their own imprint and cut a deal with Warner Brothers to handle the distribution. This provided the band with the opportunity to reach a larger audience, but other indie artists have had similar opportunities and wound up blowing it with a compromise product that offended the original fan base and failed to catch the fancy of any recognizable segment of the mainstream.

That did not happen with More Adventurous. The soundscape still features the diverse instrumentation and stylistic shifts that marked their earlier efforts, but the sound is brighter and the presentation feels more focused. Most importantly, Jenny Lewis fully embraced the lead role, bringing more confidence, command and nuance to her vocals. Her songwriting skills (with several assists from lead guitarist and ex-partner Blake Sennett) rose several notches without losing the no-bullshit emotional honesty that made you pay close attention whenever she stepped up to the mike. More Adventurous is a remarkable creation that successfully balances pathos with witty observations about the state of humankind in the year 2004 A. D.

Chris Dahlen of Pitchfork would violently disagree with that assessment. “Unfortunately, the songs (and especially the lyrics) don’t give Lewis the support she deserves. More Adventurous opens with its weakest number, ‘It’s a Hit’, whose painfully awful lyrics criticize the President by comparing him to a monkey that throws its own feces.” Robert Christgau, on the other hand, placed “It’s a Hit” eighth on his list of the top songs of the decade.

Classic Pitchfork: spend thirty seconds on a song, reach all sorts of erroneous conclusions and call it a wrap. Though I have my issues with Christgau and I don’t care much for ranking systems, I share his sentiments. “It’s a Hit” is a multi-faceted, acerbic and insightful look at the more obscene tendencies of the human race.

Here’s the “controversial” opening verse:

Any chimp can play human for a day
Use his opposable thumbs to iron his uniform
And run for office on election day
Fancy himself a real decision-maker
And deploy more troops than salt shakers
But it’s a jungle when war is made
And you’ll panic and throw your own shit at the enemy
The camera pulls back to reveal your true identity
Look, it’s a sheep in wolf’s clothing
A smoking gun holding ape

Abridged version for dummies: “The existence of war proves that on a very fundamental level, the human race has not progressed beyond the territorial tendencies of our evolutionary ancestors.” Though Bush II comes to mind in the context of the times, he’s just one of many politicians elected in part because they “served our country” (even if the service was a bullshit National Guard assignment). And all politicians, regardless of party affiliation, throw shit at their enemies when they’re caught in the act of doing something insidious and vile. Dahlen completely missed the larger issues raised by the verse . . . and completely ignored verses two through four, which further broaden the scope of the song.

The second verse deals with the pathetic urge of the dominant male to impress others by collecting and displaying various possessions that communicate his “identity” (“Any asshole can open a museum/Put all the things he loves on display so everyone can see ’em”). “Possessions” include “the house, a car, a thoughtful wife,” in keeping with the masculine nature of American society. The third verse describes the tendency of the populace to fall in love with the shiny new thing, with the latest craze, or, in this case, the preppie author whose first release dazzled the audience and is under pressure to produce another masterpiece . . . or else:

But it’s a sin when success complains
And your writer’s block, it don’t mean shit
Just throw it against the wall and see what sticks
Got to write a hit
I think this is it
It’s a hit

And if it’s not
Then it’s a holiday for hanging

Jenny closes her panorama of a dysfunctional society by capturing its need to make its collective bloodlust appear civilized through the establishment of legal procedures, allowing those responsible for executions to claim they were only following orders while justifying their misdeeds through the trappings of Christianity. But instead of attacking the system, Jenny wisely chose to confront the individual conscience:

Any fool can play executioner for a day
And say with fingers pointed in both directions
“He went thataway”
It’s only a switch or syringe
Exempt from eternal sins
But you still wear a cross
And you think you’re going to get in
Ah, but the pardons never come from upstairs
They’re always a moment too late
But it’s entertainment
Keep the crowd on their toes
It’s justice, we’re safe
It’s not a hit, it’s a holiday
Shoo bop, shoo bop, my baby
It’s a holiday for hanging, yeah 

The insertion of “Shoo bop, shoo bop, my baby” may appear superfluous, but it underscores our shoulder-shrugging tendency when (as another Bush once said about mass killings) “shit happens.” The music supporting “It’s a Hit” is ironically on the light and cheery side to emphasize the façade, with a brass band and sweet counterpoint guitar from Blake Sennett highlighting the mix. The arrangement clears out sufficient space for the listener to hear the lyrics without a cheat sheet, and Jenny’s delivery, mingling “tired conversational” and “girl group lead singer plaintiveness,” curiously manages to hit the mark.

The best analysis of “Does He Loves You?” can be found in a more-than-worthy essay on American Songwriter:

“Does He Love You?” would be noteworthy if only for the clever way the story is structured. The narrator is speaking to her pregnant, married friend who lives across the country and is questioning whether the domestic life is the right choice for her. The narrator, on the other hand, is having an affair with a married man. Only in the song’s climax is it revealed that they are both talking about the same guy, as Lewis belts out the bittersweet closing lines: “And your husband will never leave you/He will never leave you for me.”

Yet the song could easily have come off as contrived if the emotions and motivations of the characters weren’t rendered so expertly. Both the narrator and her friend regret the fact that their happiness is tied to another person, both feeling “flawed” that they are “not free.” Lewis’ vocal performance also assures that the song won’t feel like a bad soap opera, as she rises from a gentle, contemplative tone in the early verses to an anguished wail as the song closes out. The music undergoes a similar transformation, with the carnival-like keyboards in the opening verses giving way to squalling guitars and soaring strings in the denouement.

I love it when critics actually bother to study the work they’re reviewing. Kudos to Jim Beviglia!

I do admire the craft that went into the song’s creation, but I don’t share Mr. Beviglia’s fondness of the arrangement—I think the “anguished wail” would have been better served by a quieter background that doesn’t compete for attention with Jenny’s vocal. I fully agree that “Does He Love You?” is a superbly constructed song, one that exposes the layers of self-and-other deception that enter into so many allegedly intimate relationships. And like all women, I can relate easily to the cultural push to find a partner (preferably a male partner) before you’re past your physical prime, a self-denying motivation guaranteed to poison the relationship from the get-go.

But I relate much more easily to “Portions for Foxes,” unfortunately. Don’t get me wrong—it’s one of my all-time favorite songs. I’ve spent hours attempting to master Blake Sennett’s guitar parts with limited success (I think his tones are absolutely beautiful). I’ve never even thought of attempting Jenny Lewis’ vocal, which I consider one of the greatest rock vocals ever recorded. The song is a masterpiece of effective variation in dynamics, the quieter parts serving to make the syncopated guitar-bass-drum thrusts shockingly explosive. Pierre de Reeder’s bass part is subtly phenomenal and Jason Boesel is in full command of the syncopated punctuation demanded by the song. I fell in love with “Portions for Foxes” the first time I heard it and love it with the same intensity today.

But once I really absorbed the lyrics, I felt embarrassed and humiliated. If you can be embarrassed and humiliated and accept that it’s good for you, that’s a growth experience par excellence. It took me years to accept it, though—habits are habits, routines are hard to break, and shit, I was twenty-three.

I was in the “young adult stage,” according to the psychologists. Erik Erikson (the man who invented the term “identity crisis”) described this phase of life thusly: “The young adult, emerging from the search for and insistence on identity, is eager and willing to fuse their identity with others. He [or she] is ready for intimacy, that is, the capacity to commit . . . to concrete affiliations and partnerships.” True for some, not true for me and not true for the narrator in “Portions for Foxes.”

In verse one, the narrator berates herself for “talking trash,” but she’s not talking about dissing someone: she’s talking about the suggestive, smart-ass bullshit that comes out of the mouth of a young woman attempting to establish a relationship on her own terms without being particularly clear about what the terms are. Displaying attitude is a classic method for hiding one’s vulnerability, and playing hard to get still remains an effective means of raising a prospective partner’s testosterone levels:

There’s blood in my mouth
Because I’ve been biting my tongue all week
I keep on talking trash but I never say anything
And the talking leads to touching
And the touching leads to sex
And then there is no mystery left

And it’s bad news
Baby, I’m bad news
I’m just bad news, bad news, bad news

The narrator lives in the era of “friends with benefits,” a handy new term that sanctions what has been going on behind the tattered curtains of motel rooms for decades: sex without commitment. Though I usually didn’t have much of a problem getting laid during this period of my life, there were times when I’d hit one of Mick Jagger’s losing streaks. I’d spend the night tossing, turning and fingering, suffering from horniness-driven insomnia, trying to resist the urge to reach out to one of my FWB’s. I wasn’t really close to any of them; they were transactional relationships similar to taking out a loan or getting my teeth cleaned. I remember how embarrassing it was to make that call, and how I knew deep down in my soul that the benefits received would barely scratch the itch . . . but fuck it:

I know I’m alone if I’m with or without you
But just being around you offers me another form of relief
When the loneliness leads to bad dreams
And the bad dreams lead me to calling you
And I call you and say, “C’MERE!” 

Jenny’s delivery of that “C’MERE!” is the sound of the archetypal bitch in heat: burning with desire, ashamed of the vulnerability. Gives me the fucking chills every time.

The rocking arrangement vanishes for the bridge, where the pizzicato guitar establishes a mood of fragility, like tiptoeing across thin ice. The cold reality of the FWB relationship comes to the fore in Jenny’s hopeless tone and bleak lyrics, leading her to consult Psalm 63 for an analogy:

Because you’re just damage control
For a walking corpse like me
Like you 

Because we’ll all be
Portions for foxes (2)

The lines in the psalm read as follows:





I’ve never been able to resolve the many contradictions between the often gruesome Old Testament and the non-violent nature of the gospels, but I don’t think Jenny is giving us a theology lesson here. I think she’s using the analogy to highlight the soul-draining experience of commitment-less relationships while acknowledging some residue of religion-induced guilt.

But in the end, she says “fuck it” and accepts the relationship as yet another imperfect human experience:

There’s a pretty young thing in front of you
And she’s real pretty and she’s real into you
And then she’s sleeping inside of you (heavy breathing)
And the talking leads to touching
And the touching leads to sex
And then there is no mystery left 

And it’s bad news
I don’t blame you
I do the same thing
I get lonely too

Don’t we all. I look back at that period and want to beat myself up for using others before I realize, “Hey, they were using me, too!” Not the prettiest picture, but we’re talking about real life here, and real life can get pretty messy.

“Ripchord” is Blake Sennett’s elegy for Elliott Smith, who died around the time More Adventurous was recorded. The lo-fi enhanced acoustic presentation reflects Smith’s earlier work as opposed to the (slightly) more elaborate productions that followed his Oscar nomination for “Miss Misery” (featured in Good Will Hunting). The stark simplicity of the music reflects the emotional honesty of the song, one that humanizes Smith rather than trying to idealize him:

And even fancy things have finally lost their charm
Wine and diamond rings they never get you anymore
And you’re sleeping again alone
Because nobody loves you 

And they should have seen you
Should have known you
Should have known what it was like to be you 

“Should have known what it was like to be you” is one powerful line when you realize that despite his artistic achievements and broad recognition, the real Elliott Smith struggled with mental illness and addiction for years. Like Phil Ochs, who battled similar demons in his too-brief life, Smith died in his mid-30’s. Some say it was suicide, some suspect homicide, but Blake Sennett knew the guy and his more ambivalent response sounds more true to the mark:

So come on kid
Look at what you did
I don’t know if you meant it but you did yourself in
And I was even having a good day when we found out we lost you

“Ripchord” is a very moving piece, placed perfectly in the track order between two high-intensity Jenny Lewis vocals to highlight its unique qualities.

One reviewer claimed that Jenny was channeling Dusty Springfield when she did the vocal on “I Never,” a claim supported by a New York Times piece that noted Jenny’s admiration for Dusty and Loretta Lynn. To my ears, her vocal falls somewhere in between Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. Another claim verified by the participant herself features Jenny recording the vocal sans vêtements in the studio. That’s an image designed to spark many a fantasy, but regardless of whom she was trying to emulate or whether she was stripped to the gills or bundled in furs, the only thing that matters is the finished product.

Well, as Jenny once sang, “And sometimes when you’re on, you’re really fucking on,” and she is seriously fucking on in “I Never.”

The whiny guy at Pitchfork (wait, let me scroll up and get his name) . . . Oh yes, Chris Dahlen . . . didn’t think much of the song and berated Jenny for repeating the word “never” 27 times. Dude! Leave the math behind and connect with your emotional intelligence! Those repetitions are the best part of the song! Everyone who has ever been truly in love knows that words are completely inadequate when it comes to describing the depth and enormity of the F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E. (thank you, Jarvis Cocker). The tonal variations in those twenty-seven renditions communicate a multitude of feelings—tenderness, delight, anxiety, commitment, satisfaction, regret, resolve, insecurity, appreciation—jeez maneez, dude! “The song runs out of words” my ass!


“The Absence of God” highlights a quality you’ll find often in Rilo Kiley’s music: light music applied to heavy topics. Here the music is dominated by a sweet acoustic guitar duet while the narrator struggles with the existence/nonexistence of god and the consequences thereof. As noted in an excellent article on by Kristin Rawls on Bitch Media, Jenny has written frequently on the topic of religion, firmly condemning religious hypocrisy while expressing ambivalence about the value of religious belief. This particular vignette features a narrator frustrated with the lack of forward movement in her relationship, musing over possibilities to kickstart the romance. “The absence of god will bring you comfort, baby,” she assures her lover, then follows that statement in classic existential style with a series of choices they could make when free from the grip of religion. After all, if there is no god, human beings are free to make their own choices and live/learn from the consequences . . . with the inconvenient complication that flawed human beings often make flawed choices:

We could be daytime drunks if we wanted
We’d never get anything done that way, baby
And we’d still be ruled by our dueling perspectives
And I’m not my perspective
Or the lies I’ll tell you every time

As we learn more about the narrator and her disaster movie mindset coupled with self-destructive tendencies (“And I say there’s trouble when everything is fine/The need to destroy things creeps up on me every time”), we realize that she is motivated primarily by desperation—pretty shaky grounds for either accepting or rejecting god. I love the ambivalence and multiple layers of meaning in the song, allowing the listener to reach their own conclusions.

“Accidntel Deth” (the spelling reflects producer Jimmy Tamborello’s fetish with unnecessary vowels) offers the intriguing concept that the “victim” may have inadvertently contributed to their “accidental death” but falls short of supporting the concept with more concrete examples. Next up is the title track, with its country feel accentuated by pedal steel guitar and harmonica. It’s a sweet piece of work that essentially defines “more adventurous” as “becoming more open to the beautiful possibilities inherent in true love.”

And if you banish me from your profits
And if I get banished from the kingdom up above
I’d sacrifice money and heaven all for love
Let me be loved
Let me be loved

Underscoring the rejection of conventional means of sacrament and legal procedure, the last verse focuses on what is most important:

For me to be saved and you to be brave
We don’t have to walk down that isle
Because if marriage ain’t enough well
At least we’ll be loved

Jenny employs many different voicings on the album, but I think “More Adventurous” is her sweetest and most grounded performance.

We get back to kicking some ass with “Love and War (11/11/46),” a fascinating composition with two distinct narratives. The first, contained within the first three verses, describes the collapse of morality that accompanies every war. Jenny wisely avoids the raping-and-pillaging part, focusing instead on the looser environment occasioned by the feeling of impending doom. “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE SOON SO LET’S FUCK OUR BRAINS OUT.” Cultural norms often pressured couples guilty of pre-marital sex to make things official, but really, that was then, this is now, and what the hell are we doing standing at this altar?

Why must you try to ruin my peace of mind?
And they were only words and I never meant them
I never loved you
Even in my weakness
You were fuel for the fire – cannon fodder

The second narrative introduces us to a WWII vet viewed by those responsible for his care as an alien from a planet no one ever heard of:

And my grandpa drank, fell, and broke his face in two
When the cops arrived, he exclaimed, “I fought in World War II”
And then carried him to darkened hospital room
And said, “No modern person here remembers you
And we can’t identify the enemy
And it could be you so it’ll cost you”
And it only cost me my wife
And my job
Now what?

The final verse features the narrator and her mom going to the hospital to identify the body (though mom made her wait outside) and going to the cemetery . . . all over a stop-time rock beat punctuated with Beatle-like handclaps. The energetic arrangement completely demolishes the natural expectation that a military funeral would be marked by solemnity, and her mother’s parting words form a defense of the looser morality of the war years:

“Love and war, in heaven and in hell
You get what you deserve
You’d better spend it well
All is fair in love and war and love
A civil war like this it always sells itself”

You can interpret “civil war” in two ways—an ironic comment about a world that establishes rules of engagement covering acceptable ways to kill people or the belief that we are all one human race and therefore all wars are civil wars.

“A Man/Me/Then Jim” is written in nonlinear narrative form with Jenny appearing in multiple roles, so when you’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on, keep in mind Jean-Luc Godard’s assertion that “a film should have a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.” For those who may feel frustrated with the jumble, let me remind you that linear order is something we impose on reality and not reality itself. The truth does not always come packaged with step-by-step instructions.

The three verses are structured as follows:

  1. The funeral of a guy named Jim who committed suicide. The narrator is an unknown man, a friend of Jim who attends the funeral. This is the ending.
  2. An interaction with a salesperson who happens to be Jim’s wife. The narrator is “me” (it really doesn’t matter who “me” is). The wife divulges that Jim’s “a-leaving,” so we can safely assume that Jim is still alive at this point. This is the beginning.
  3. The narrator of the last verse is Jim himself, who has by this time left his wife and is attempting reconciliation. This is the middle.

The interesting twist in all this is the miscommunication between Jim and his wife that eventually leads to Jim’s death. The wife claims “Well, my husband, he’s a-leaving/And I can’t convince him to stay,” while Jim believes with all his heart that she threw his ass out.

I was driving south from Melrose
I happened upon my old lover’s old house
I found myself staring at the closed-up door
Like the day she threw me out
“Diana, Diana, Diana, I would die for you
I’m in love with you completely
I’m afraid that’s all I can do”
She said, “You can sleep upon my doorstep
You can promise me indifference, Jim
But my mind is made up
And I’ll never let you in again”

No wonder Jim’s suicide note turns out to be a big fuck you to the missus: “If living is the problem/Well, that’s just baffling.” The wife grudgingly admitted in her conversation with “me” that “I’m sorry I’m hard to live with/Living is the problem for me.” What really killed Jim was “the slow fade of love,” described as the realization that once the glow of marital bliss has faded, you find yourself living a lie:

For the slow fade of love
It might hit you from below
It’s your gradual descent into a life you never meant
It’s the slow fade of love

The music has the feel of Jimmy Buffett-style decadence with its acoustic guitar and bongoes, with faint organ serving as a subconscious reminder of mortality. I love good stories, and “A Man/Me/Then Jim” is a good story told well—one that makes me wish that the Lewis-Sennett songwriting team would have held it together longer than they did.

The album ends with Jenny’s take on Elliott Smith’s death, “It Just Is.” In contrasting the two elegies, Blake’s is stronger in terms of emotional impact while Jenny’s reminder “That it just is/That everybody dies” is more uncomfortable. The human race goes to great lengths to avoid the simple truth that life has an ending.

One would naturally expect that an album featuring three different producers would result in a disjointed mess, but the production values on More Adventurous are remarkably consistent. The diversity of the musical content is refreshing rather than confusing, and the album is loaded with great stories and superb performances. Though it was a difficult journey for me to circle back and reconnect with More Adventurous some fifteen years later, I’m glad I made the trip—it’s always nice to find out that an album you thought was the bees’ knees turns out to be better than you remembered.

Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited – Classic Music Review

Although my dad has been needling me for years to do more Dylan reviews, this time he didn’t have to ask. Bob Dylan was the obvious choice to break my American Boycott, for three important reasons:

  1. Many Americans believe he is the greatest poet of his generation, especially the Baby Boomers (though Dylan was born a few months before Pearl Harbor and fails to qualify as a Boomer). His status as a poet is still subject to debate, as demonstrated by the rather defensive argument given by Professor Sara Danius of the Swedish Academy when she announced that Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature: “He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition.” This implies she had already received some blowback from academics outraged by the selection of someone who had the audacity to put lyrics to music. “Poetry is for reading!” I can hear the old farts blubbering. I attribute that reaction to natural memory loss, since the Greek poets had combined words and song over two millennia ago, in the form of lyric poetry.
  2. Whether you like his work or not, he has had an undeniably powerful influence on the course of popular music by extending its range to include subject matter beyond romance and novelty. More than any other artist, Bob Dylan made lyrics matter, vastly improving the quality of music in multiple genres.
  3. Finally, Dylan has repeatedly proven himself to be a true blue American by appearing in commercials for Pepsi, Victoria’s Secret and Chrysler.

The Chrysler commercial really hit a nerve. Super Bowl ads invariably attract the greatest number of viewers, but the Pepsi ad was also a Super Bowl ad and didn’t come close to generating the buzz of the Chrysler spot. Methinks the uproar had more to do with the method of delivery than the message. In his first two appearances as a shill, Dylan simply provided the music (doing a “Forever Young” duet with Will.I.Am. for Pepsi; crooning “Love Sick” to Adriana Lima in the Victoria Secret ad). In the Chrysler spot, he narrated the entire two-minute pitch. Because recorded interviews with Bob Dylan are as rare as coherent thoughts from Donald Trump, millions of people watching the commercial had probably never heard him speak. Given that many of those viewers had elevated Dylan to god-like status years before, the impact must have been similar to the shock of the Japanese populace when Emperor Hirohito’s voice crackled over the fragile airwaves to announce the surrender. DYLAN SPEAKS! THE EMPEROR SPEAKS! SILENCE IN THE HOUSE! HEED THE WORDS OF THE EMPEROR!

After one minute of silence accompanied only by the sound of guacamole and chips making contact with teeth and gums, angry viewers wailed in unison: “DYLAN HAS SOLD OUT!” In the morning they woke up to news rags of all stripes screaming “DYLAN SELLS OUT!” A more reasoned analysis by Ruben Navarette unearthed the layers of hypocrisy in Dylan’s core message of American pride: “Let Germany brew your beer,” he says. “Let Switzerland make your watch. Let Asia assemble your phone. We will build your car.” The simple fact that Chrysler had been recently purchased by Fiat pretty much demolished the “Buy American” message. Dylan was certainly guilty of “nostalgic manipulation,” calling up an image of America that died in the 1970s when the bosses of the big automakers ignored the threat of reliable high-mileage cars rolling off the assembly lines in once-defeated and desolate Japan. Dylan defenders could argue that the ad formed a subversive message of support for the guys and gals on the assembly lines screwed by blind management and a dumb trade policy that failed to protect their jobs, but the bottom line is that the cultural icon of the anti-establishment 60s, a man who consistently protested the excesses of capitalism and exposed the system as a massive get-rich-quick scheme open to insiders only, made a nice chunk of change on that fateful Super Bowl Sunday.

So yeah, Dylan is a sellout, but who the fuck in America hasn’t “sold out” at one time or another? Having grown up and lived most of my life in the land of Old Glory, I can personally attest that I cannot recall a single acquaintance who either wasn’t a sellout or who would have gladly sold themselves out if given the opportunity. It’s a matter of degree: some people would sell out their mothers and any shred of decency lingering within their damaged psyches for the big payoff, but the vast majority of us sell out in a more socially-acceptable manner: by giving up our dreams and compromising our values the moment we take a job we don’t really want. Well, shit, you’ve got to pay the rent and put food on the table, right? And once you’ve made that deal with the devil, oh my—look at all the things you can buy now! Have some more credit! Consume, consume, consume! I’ve been there, you’ve been there, we’ve all been there. Americans are wired to try to make a buck—it’s part of the cultural DNA. In taking advantage of a lucrative opportunity, Dylan’s behavior was in perfect alignment with the values and priorities of the vast majority of Americans, giving his status as a true American poet even greater credibility. Dylan spent most of his peak years attacking and satirizing the system, but he also understood that he had to live within that system, and like everyone else, played the angles to the best of his ability. Just because he chose to exploit the opportunities provided by fame doesn’t make his social commentary and observations on the state of the human race any less meaningful.

Sorry, but sellouts have no right to call anyone else a sellout, so give poor Bob a break here. He’s only one guy, and one guy can’t change the world. Much of his early work was geared towards trying to motivate his Baby Boomer listeners to get up off their asses and make the world a better place. And that effort did yield demonstrable progress in many areas (until the Boomers got scared and voted in Reagan and Trump, undoing half the progress they made).

Dylan’s desire to expose the system as an inhuman creation of human beings still runs hot throughout Highway 61 Revisited, and the movement away from protest songs so apparent on Bringing It All Back Home is now complete. In its place are vignettes that dramatize the unfairness and absurdity of it all. Although sometimes his symbolist leanings lead to little more than wordplay, the best songs—er, poems—are marked by powerful imagery pregnant with meaning.

“Like a Rolling Stone” was a breakthrough for Dylan in many ways, for at the time of its composition he was seriously considering tossing his musical career down the shithole. He told Playboy, “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation . . . But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all. I mean it was something that I myself could dig. It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.” What began as “this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long” eventually turned into one of the most influential singles ever written, and convinced Dylan to stick with songwriting. During the months leading to its creation, he had developed the practice of sitting in front of the typewriter and dumping everything that came into his head onto paper. This cleansing ritual helped rid his brain of various expectations, overbearing influences and miscellaneous crap, enabling him to find his own voice within the muck. And I mean “voice” literally and figuratively—I’ve never considered Dylan much of a singer (she said in a tone that communicated understatement), but on “Like a Rolling Stone” he sings with absolute clarity and confidence, like a man who has found his true calling.

On one level, the piece is the ultimate karma’s-a-bitch song, with Dylan seemingly taking pleasure at Miss Lonely’s plummet from privilege. And while I certainly don’t buy the interpretation pitched by Jann Wenner that the song celebrates the poor woman’s liberation, I don’t accept Dylan’s offhand comment that the song is mainly about revenge. To my ears, the lyrics are a justifiable expression of outrage at the obliviousness of the wealthy, white and privileged when it comes to the suffering and resentment they generate. For me, the core couplet of the song appears at the beginning of the third verse:

Ah, you never turned around to see the frowns

It’s that kind of obliviousness that earned Marie Antoinette a trip to the guillotine, the ugly fuel that feeds the justifiable resentment of the underclasses against an arbitrary system based on inheritance and tradition. That such an arrangement is allowed to exist in an allegedly democratic society is a fucking outrage. I think of the British, still under the rule of Etonians and Oxonians who have peddled the bullshit quality of their “superior” education for centuries. The truth is much more prosaic:

Ah you’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it

Her fall from grace, occasioned by one of the many frauds who prey on the leisure class, is depicted in terrifying fashion, and any empathy we feel for Miss Lonely comes from the vivid description of her new life at rock bottom:

You say you never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?

She has no choice but to sell herself for money, because of the uninformed and oblivious choices she made while riding high:

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal
How does it feel, ah how does it feel?

You may notice that there’s no evidence that Miss Lonely has learned a damned thing. Dylan doesn’t supply us with an appendix or a sequel describing how she rose from the mat and became a passionate social activist dedicated to eliminating income inequality and social injustice. Instead, he leaves her in the cold streets, devoid of understanding, clueless as to how she got there, another life trying to survive in the darkness, surrounded by society’s castoffs, part of an underclass created by an upper class that couldn’t care less.

The music that accompanies “Like a Rolling Stone” serves its purpose by providing Dylan an open stage to recite his lyrics. Mike Bloomfield was on a tight leash (Dylan told him he “didn’t want any of that B. B. King stuff”), and his contribution is appropriately pedestrian. Al Kooper lost his guitar slot once Bloomfield entered the picture, and over the protests of producer Tom Wilson, slipped into the mix on the organ. His contribution can be easily reproduced by any church-going grandma with a cheap portable electronic keyboard. The most impactful decision came early on, with the change from 3/4 to 4/4 time, unstiffening the flow and aligning the music with rock sensibilities (you can hear the “waltz” version on Volume 2 of The Bootleg Series, and it’s bloody awful). “Like a Rolling Stone” smashed paradigms about song length and subject matter in rock music, and remains one damned fine piece of work.

With a few notable exceptions, the music on Highway 61 Revisited is unremarkable, but hey, Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, not music (no, there isn’t a Nobel for music, but he wouldn’t have been under consideration had there been one). Half the songs are little more than standard blues progressions or variations thereof, beginning with “Tombstone Blues.” Though Bloomfield gets in a few good licks during the presentation, the rest of the band (including Dylan) seem to spend most of the time struggling to keep with the choppy, high-speed rhythm. The struggle has nothing to do with the chords, which add up to a grand total of two. The lyrics fall into the symbolist-surreal camp without much in the way of concrete imagery, and the listener leaves the table hungry for meaning. It’s one of those Dylan songs that have a few good lines you can quote to enliven a dull conversation; of those, the last verse takes home the gold:

Now, I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

Ironic that these lines appear in a song largely bereft of melody. While it’s tough to follow a masterpiece, “Tombstone Blues” would be a poor choice no matter where it appeared on the tracklist.

“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” features an easy, loping beat with a last-call honkytonk feel courtesy of Paul Griffin on piano and the rhythm section of Harvey Brooks (delivering a rather cheeky and playful bass line) and Bobby Gregg on drums. Though my usual reaction to a Dylan harmonica solo is “Hurry up and move on, Bob,” this one is well played and features a fantastic flourish at the end, as if he’d like to have another go-round. In addition to providing Steely Dan with the title of their debut album, the song foreshadows his deeper exploration of country sounds in John Wesley Harding. And though I wish his use of sexual metaphor could have been a little more explicit (or more complete with the introduction of a tunnel for that train to slide into), I deeply appreciate the line, “I want to be your lover baby, I don’t want to be your boss,” an emphatic rejection of all those early rock songs that made a big deal about making a girl “mine.”

The second attempt at blues-based rock, “From a Buick 6” doesn’t fare much better than the first—it’s a stiff presentation, in large part due to Harvey Brooks’ annoying make-sure-you-hit-all-the-right-notes bass part. Dylan seems to have fun singing about his shotgun-equipped squeeze who puts up with his shit and pulls his ass out of various jams, but “From a Buick 6” is not one of his most memorable works.

“Ballad of a Thin Man” certainly is. In order to appreciate the context of the song, I suggest you crank up your cable TV with its thousands of channels and find one of the networks airing old sitcoms around the clock. You’ll want to find episodes of three shows: The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Notice the manicured lawns and manicured white people. Pay attention to the routines, and how the boys raid the refrigerator after a long day at school, how the dads sit in their easy chairs and read the afternoon paper after a hard day at work (except Ozzie—does anyone know what the fuck he did for a living?), how the family all sits down together for a dinner of meat, vegetables, potatoes and milk, how the neighbors drop in without knocking and are invariably greeted with a smile, how the moms are always in dresses and have plenty of time on their hands to make the beds and straighten up the living rooms without breaking a sweat. Pay particular attention to the characters of Ricky, Bud and Beaver, the three boys most likely to cause “trouble” by getting into “scrapes,” and how dad (or mom, on rare occasions) gets them out of the fix and wraps it up by giving them fatherly advice related to one of life’s lessons—all of which have to nothing to do with helping the boys find their true selves, but have everything to do with enforcing conformity to social norms that reflect the American ideal.

This was the America of Mr. Jones, a society where everyone knew their roles, where everyone adopted a very narrow definition of right and wrong, where everyone followed a routine, where everyone watched the same shows, where everyone’s goal was to try their very best to be a “good” father, mother, son, daughter, businessman, housewife, etc. That was the America that sucked the life out of early rock ‘n’ roll, the America that assigned degrading roles to women and people of color, the America that worked diligently to create a predictable, safe environment for its citizenry.

The façade began to crack in 1963 due to the Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy Assassination, two events that shattered the manufactured image of American perfectionism. Women, equipped with The Pill and lessons from The Feminine Mystique, began to assert themselves in unfeminine, unpredictable ways. By 1965, the world of the Nelsons, Andersons and Cleavers seemed on the “eve of destruction,” and all those Mr. Joneses (Ozzie, Jim and Ward) who had built their lives around a very specific set of rules and the virtue of predictability proved themselves completely incapable of comprehending it all:

And somebody points to you and says, “It’s his”
But something is happening and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

The verses in “Ballad of a Thin Man” form a series of nonsensical interactions, sort of like distorted takes on “Who’s on First” that evoke terror instead of laughter. What is most terrifying to Mr. Jones is that his “proper” education, where success is measured not by critical thinking ability but the ability to memorize certain “truths” and regurgitate them during the final exam, has left him completely unprepared to deal with the unexpected:

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well-read, it’s well-known
But something is happening here and you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mr. Jones?

The unusually complex chord pattern (for Dylan) clearly indicates a song written on piano, as the contortions necessary to pull off that F#augBb in the second position on a guitar is itself a paradigm-breaker, whereas it’s a simple adjustment on a keyboard. Kooper’s horror-movie organ enhances the other-worldly feel of the song to the nth degree. Meanwhile, Mike Bloomfield plays his supporting role to perfection with nimble complementary counterpoint mixed with shimmery vibrato chords. Dylan’s vocal has all the right touches, and you can tell he’s on his game in the first verse:

You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
(laugh) You try so hard but you don’t understand
Just what you will say when you get home

That little laugh feels like, “You’re kidding, right? You don’t know how to explain a naked man to your wife? Uh . . . hasn’t she ever seen one?” Perhaps not. It was twin beds/lights out for Rob and Laura, after all.

Flipping over to Side Two, we get “Queen Jane Approximately,” which most have interpreted as a softer version of “Like a Rolling Stone,” with the main character awash in the emptiness of a life based on materialism and the “need” to impress others. The difference is that Queen Jane’s story takes place before the crash, giving Dylan the opportunity to offer himself as her savior. The problem with the accepted interpretation of the song is Dylan’s response to Nora Ephron (cited in Andy Gill’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right) that “Queen Jane is a man.” At first glance, Dylan’s assertion smells like bullshit, but after turning the lyrics upside down and inside out in my head for weeks, I realized I was attempting to interpret the song through contemporary norms regarding LGBTQ relationships, forgetting that the song was written over four years before the Stonewall Riots when homosexuals were considered persona non grata.

Viewing the song through that lens changes everything. Instead of viewing Queen Jane as some form of debutante bored with it all and dealing with her looming old maid status by refusing to see anyone, the line “When your mother sends back all your invitations” becomes a mother’s painful rejection of a son for his immoral, socially-unacceptable behavior. The interpretation gains more validity in the third verse, especially when you remember that homosexuality was described as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” in the DSM as late as 1973:

When all of your advisers heave their plastic
At your feet to convince you of your pain
Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic

Some of the “treatments” prescribed by mental health “advisers” to “cure” homosexuality were indeed “drastic,” including electro-convulsive therapy applied to the brain and genitals, castration and lobotomies. Given that Dylan spent his more focused formative years in the Village, he would have been acutely aware of the existence of the homosexual underclass and their struggles. So while I could be completely off-base by interpreting the song through my personal lens of bisexuality, let me point out the obvious: when you hear the word “queen,” what comes to mind after you’ve emptied your memory of British female monarchs, Freddie Mercury and the four suits in a deck of cards?

Proving that “third time’s the charm” isn’t just an exhausted cliché, Dylan and his pals finally hit pay dirt in the field of blues-based rock with “Highway 61 Revisited.” Though now truncated and merged with various interstate and US highways, Highway 61 is best known as the Blues Highway; the intersection with US-49 is the crossroads where Robert Johnson allegedly offered up his soul to Satan. At the time the song was written, the road stretched from the Delta to Duluth, where Dylan was born (the cutoff is now in the center of Minnesota, in the town of Wyoming). In Dylan’s imagination, Highway 61 is the place to go if you want to accomplish something that either a.) falls outside the boundaries of socially unacceptable behavior or b.) falls outside of society’s capabilities. It’s the ultimate back-channel for making things happen.

The steady, rollicking beat gives a singer lots of flexibility with their phrasing, and Dylan takes full advantage of that opportunity. Combined with his use of American vernacular (as opposed to high-falutin’ ”poetic” language), his phrasing reminds me of a street corner storyteller, a guy whose flair for language draws a crowd of regulars who gather ’round to hear his latest riffs. In the first verse, he transforms the story of Abraham and Isaac into a tale anyone can relate to through his use of everyday language, his depiction of a religious icon as an Average Joe and conversational phrasing with pauses and emphases in all the right places:

God said, “Out on Highway 61”

Beneath the fun and language games you’ll find pointed commentary on the state of things in 60’s America. Georgia Sam in verse two (likely a reference to Blind Willie McTell) is a black man desperate to escape something (a lynch mob, the troopers, whatever) and asks poor Howard about an escape route. As Howard is carrying a gun, we can assume that Howard is poor and white; if so, we’re left wondering whether his directions to Highway 61 will lead Georgia Sam to freedom or to his demise. Verse three satirizes American consumerism and the useless junk left in its wake; the fourth takes on the myth of the American nuclear family. The last verse held special meaning for a populace living under the ever-present threat of nuclear war and the real-time escalation of the American presence in Vietnam, but Dylan’s insight is even more relevant today, given the presence of the roving gambler in the White House and the sycophants who eagerly do his bidding:

Now, the roving gambler he was very bored
Trying to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
But yes, I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61”

Though I wish Dylan had eased up on the siren whistle after a while, “Highway 61 Revisited” qualifies as both a hoot and a storytelling masterpiece.

Dylan songs often improve when other people sing them, and I do prefer Judy Collins’ rendition of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” on In My Life with its varied instrumentation featuring winds and pizzicato strings. That said, Dylan’s version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” somehow feels more intimate and true-to-life. Integrating bits of Rimbaud, Kerouac, Poe and Hank Williams, the tale describes the experience of a painter (according to Mr. Dylan) who (like nearly every American expat who chose Mexico as their getaway destination) finds himself the victim of what he might define as “gringo exploitation,” but is more accurately the alienation he feels as a stranger in a strange land, where the exploiter has now become the exploited, where Americans are viewed with suspicion and distrust:

Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English and she invites you up into her room
And you’re so kind and careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon

His attempt to distance himself from the culture through an attitude of cultural superiority hasn’t worked (“And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through”), and since he doesn’t want to wind up like Angel (“Who looked so fine at first but left looking just like a ghost”), he decides to move on: “I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough.” Good call, dude.

Now we arrive at the single reason why I have resisted reviewing Highway 61 Revisited with every fiber of my being: eleven minutes and twenty-four seconds of “Desolation Row.” The listening experience is a drag; the music rarely varies (three chords, I-IV-V); and the one notable variation—a Marty Robbins-like “latin-flavored” guitar counterpoint courtesy of Charlie McCoy—gets tiresome after the third verse. Geez, Bob, couldn’t you have pulled something out of the Johnny Cash Playbook and changed the key a couple of times? The lack of a narrative discourages continuing disinterest; the song is just ten stanzas of poetry randomly thrown together connected only by their proximity to Desolation Row. New York Times critic Robert Shelton watched Dylan perform the piece in concert and described it “another of Mr. Dylan’s musical Rorschachs capable of widely varied interpretation . . . It can best be characterized as a ‘folk song of the absurd’.”

I tend to agree, but getting back to the Swedish Academy justification for the Nobel Prize, the poem generally reads well. Some of the stanzas click; others seem overwrought; some feel like gibberish. I suggest you skip the album track, read the poem and pick your favorite verse. As I’m forever interested in the subject of gender within culture, my favorite is the second verse:

And puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis style
And the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row

I always thought Romeo was an asshole and I hope the ambulances mean that Cinderella kicked his entitled male ass.

Highway 61 Revisited usually appears in the top ten in those greatest albums of all-time lists—lists that are still largely compiled by Baby Boomers. Although the reasoning behind those lists is fundamentally flawed (appreciation of a given piece of music is always affected by mood and individual experience), I can fully understand why the album has achieved such lofty status. In the context of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited was the ultimate mind-blower, an integration of folk, blues and rock loaded with compelling lyrics—lyrics that were light years ahead of anything else on the charts, lyrics that caused people to stop and re-think “reality.” What blows my mind is that there was once a period in modern history when producing intelligent, thought-provoking music resulted in mass-market acceptance and commercial success.

Hard to imagine that now.

%d bloggers like this: