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"Love and Theft"
Bob Dylan, 11 September, 2001
Review printed in Third Way, September 2001.
Buying a new Bob Dylan album is like doing the lottery - an
act of faith in chaos. Seasoned gamers can look back to the
80s as a losing streak bookended by two wonderful pay-offs,
Infidels and Oh Mercy. The 90s started with disappointment
before descending into a stream of covers and reissues -
Dylan's 'writer's block' period - until the 1997 jackpot
Time Out of Mind which came from nowhere, in all its
desperate glory.
All of which makes "Love and Theft" hard to hear without it being either deflated by comparisons with its predecessor, or inflated by our being so braced for disappointment. The world's press have gone for the latter, at seems, instantly hailing it as the greatest Dylan album since the last one, intoxicated by the phenomenon of two good records in a row.
Three things immediately strike you on hearing "Love and Theft". Firstly, it is far lighter in mood than anything Time Out of Mind would lead you to expect; we've done staring death in the face, now we hit the town. Secondly, it is musically very strong. Every performance is assured and masterful, and Dylan's voice has not sounded better in over a decade. Thirdly, it is profoundly odd.
Among the familiar rock and blues, the album is full of pastiche, especially from the 1930s, making it sound at moments like a sound track for O Brother Where Art Thou or The Great Gatsby (from which he quotes at one point). If, as The Independent [?] suggested, Time Out of Mind was Dylan in hell, this is Dylan at a dinner dance.
The record is also littered with Tommy Cooperesque jokes ('I'm sittin' on my watch - so I can be on time'), even an incongruous knock knock. One gets the impression - borne up in interviews - that Dylan, somewhat taken aback by the gothic monster he created last time, is trying rather hard to keep things light.
The big question though is what the greatest spiritual writer of popular culture has to say for himself. In one respect at least, plenty: "Love and Theft" must have more words on it than any other single Dylan album. It is a giddying ride down a whitewater stream of consciousness, skipping through place and time and mood and idea like a nine-year-old with a remote. It throws up some memorable one-liners, and some ol' time Dylanesque characters - the Southern sheriff hunting down Charles Darwin, and Romeo giving Juliet some constructive criticism on her complexion ('Juliet said back to Romeo,/Why don't you just shove off?').
The coming of ripe years looms large again. But while the shadow of Time Out of Mind falls across lines like 'emptiness is endless, cold as the clay', there is something more positive too, and Dylan looks back with affection. With irony too: recalling The Who's 'Hope I die before I get old', Dylan's revised decision is to 'die before I turn senile'. Moonlight offers sustained reflections on the theme, a love song that melds the coming of autumn with the coming of age. It is hardly an original image, but Dylan does it with a lyrical beauty reminiscent of Thomas Hardy. Rock and roll is not notable for its services to the dignity of old age, but Dylan is making a welcome recompense.
Angels, devils and the clergy are still part of Dylan's cast, but mostly as bit parts. Faith is part of the landscape, not a pressing concern. What is intriguing is how often he entangles the language of religion and warfare: 'I'm preachin' the word of God, I'm puttin' out your eyes'; 'I'm gonna baptise you in fire so you can sin no more/I wanna establish my rule through civil war'. It creates a powerfully complex vision of human nature. And as 'lurve'is often mixed in at the same point, we see romance and revenge, faith and cruelty, agape Eros and Mars, all hopelessly enmeshed. As well as the psychological insight, it brings war down to the personal realm, a compelling statement that violence is never ultimately the work of nations or churches, but of the contradictions of the human being. The time is past when people scoured Dylan's albums for prophecies, but hearing this amid recent news - it was released on 11 September - is at moments quite chilling. Stephen Tomkins
