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Rock/pop

Bob Dylan: Tempest

Tempest
Bob Dylan: Tempest
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When Bob Dylan retreated to Woodstock in 1967 and began writing and recording songs with The Band, those oft- bootlegged sessions soon became the stuff of legend. The new material had deep roots and was quintessentially American. For Dylan this was an opportunity to recharge his batteries after burning out on drugs and the music business. Here the zeitgeist was with him, as many people embraced the opportunity to feel realigned, especially after the 1968 release of The Band’s Music From Big Pink brought a more down to earth aesthetic to the table.

Recently that urge to get back to the roots has been a steadily reoccurring narrative in our music culture, and to this list we can add Dylan himself—which is a good thing, as the albums between Infidels and Love and Theft struggled to find a sound that suited him. Often overproduced, these records strained to put Dylan’s music into a contemporary context.

Which made Love and Theft all the sweeter. The 2001 effort ushered in a sound that, like The Basement Tapes, was based on a rich blend of American roots music, and the more rough-hewn style seemed more compatible with his increasingly ragged voice. Tellingly, the album was produced by Jack Frost, alias Bob Dylan, who also produced Modern Times and Together Through Life. True to form, the self-produced Tempest features mandolins, violins, banjos, acoustic and steel guitars, upright bass, and accordion playing strains of country, country swing, blues, rockabilly, and folk music. Lyrically, too, the past is present. The opener “Duquesne Whistle” is an upbeat ditty that unapologetically uses stock nostalgic imagery with lines like “You’re smiling through the fence at me” and “I wonder if that old oak tree’s still standing.”

The tone quickly darkens, however, as Dylan trots out a hard-edged cast of characters that includes gamblers, pimps, thieves, “two-timing Slim,” loiterers, plunderers, adulterers, angry beggars, drug addicts, alcoholics, whores, peddlers and meddlers, harlots, murderers, jealous lovers, a suicide victim, and the British Army. The evil-doing on Tempest has a Nineteenth Century ring to it, as does some deliberately archaic diction and heavy-handed meter. In theory such devices shouldn’t work, but count them among the lyrical rules that Dylan breaks with aplomb. Non sequiturs abound, and the cadence sometimes falls apart completely, while some lines are just plain weird (“What you doing out there in the sun anyway/Don’t you know, the sun can burn your brains right out”).

On less inspired efforts Dylan seemed to be releasing product just to stay in the game. Here he’s brimming with ideas, to the point where the formalist in you might say he’s trying to stuff too much into one song. Me, I like the messiness— and I wish some of it had spilled over into the recording, where the instruments are relegated to the background and woven together almost seamlessly behind Dylan’s voice, minimizing individual contributions while creating a sense of artificial separation between the band and the singer. 

By Jeff Wilson

This will take some explaining, but I can connect the dots between pawing through LPs at a headshop called Elysian Fields in Des Moines, Iowa, as a seventh grader, and becoming the Music Editor for The Absolute Sound. At that starting point—around 1970/71—Elysian Fields had more LPs than any other store in Des Moines. Staring at all the colorful covers was both tantalizing and frustrating. I had no idea who most of the artists were, because radio played only a fraction of what was current. To figure out what was going on, I realized that I needed to build a record collection—and as anyone who’s visited me since high school can testify, I succeeded. Record collecting was still in my blood when, starting in the late 1980s, the Cincinnati Public Library book sale suddenly had an Elysian Fields quantity of LPs from people who’d switched to CDs. That’s where I met fellow record hawk Mark Lehman, who preceded me as music editor of TAS. Mark introduced me to Jonathan Valin, whose 1993 detective novel The Music Lovers depicts the battles between record hawks at library sales. That the private eye in the book, Harry Stoner, would stumble upon a corpse or two while unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of some rare Living Stereo platters made perfect sense to me. After all, record collecting is serious business. Mark knew my journalistic experience included concert reviews for The Cincinnati Enquirer and several long, sprawling feature articles in the online version of Crawdaddy. When he became TAS music editor in 2008, he contacted me about writing for the magazine. I came on board shortly after the latest set of obituaries had been written for vinyl—and, as fate had it, right when the LP started to make yet another unexpected comeback. Suddenly, I found myself scrambling to document all the record companies pressing vinyl. Small outfits were popping up world-wide, and many were audiophile-oriented, plus already existing record companies began embracing the format again. Trying to keep track of everything made me feel, again, like that overwhelmed seventh grader in Elysian Fields, and as Music Editor I’ve found that keeping my finger on the pulse of the music world also requires considerable detective work. I’ve never had a favorite genre, but when it comes time to sit down and do some quality listening, for me nothing beats a well-recorded small-group jazz recording on vinyl. If a stereo can give me warmth and intimacy, tonal accuracy, clear imaging, crisp-sounding cymbals, and deep, woody-sounding bass, then I’m a happy camper.

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