Dylan is a public intellectual who has always used America’s rich and bizarre history and culture to gain a new understanding of his present.
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1968 was a mental disaster, an election year where the two options were Richard Nixon, the “law and order” Republican who claimed to speak for a “silent majority”, and Hubert Humphrey, a centrist Democratic vice president who appealed to the American sense of decency. An economic crisis was looming as a flu pandemic approached from abroad. Racial justice tensions exploded in the streets following the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., inspiring protests and riots in more than 100 American cities. Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Washington DC burned. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley authorized police to “shoot, maim, or paralyze” looters and arsonists; by the end of the summer, the CPD had killed a 17-year-old protester at a rally at the Democratic National Convention, one of many who died in the violent police response. In Woodstock, New York, Bob Dylan, a voice of eloquent youthful dissatisfaction in some previous years, stayed at home.
That year was also Dylan’s first extended break from songwriting since he signed with Columbia Records at the other end of the decade. The folk-rock singer and his wife Sara were raising two babies with a third one on the way. Woodstock’s home became a refuge after his motorcycle accident in 1966. He stopped traveling for what would become an eight-year period, bypassing the festival at Max Yasgur’s farm just 60 miles west in 1969, Returning to the road in the next decade to play hits only after a series of criticized albums, soundtracks, and compilations eroded his position on the board and his critical prestige. The music that Bob Dylan wrote in the late 1960s is an attempt to escape the pressure of being the voice of a generation. 1969’s Nashville Skyline it’s a beautiful foray into the pure country, and 1970 Self Portrait it’s a thorny batch of weird covers and originals, a sleek commercial album followed by a parody of form.
For the past decade, in a political climate increasingly identical to the turmoil of the late 1960s, Bob Dylan disappeared again into the Great American Songbook. After the dark and foreboding of 2012 Storm, Dylan released three standards albums in rapid succession, beginning in 2015. Shadows in the night, a collection of songs that Frank Sinatra made famous and that returned to that well for the years 2016 Fallen angels before completing the experiment with the triple covers album 2017 Triplicate. The recordings were picturesque and often beautiful, building on a great relationship between the singer-songwriter and the band from their long Never Ending Tour. But they painted a portrait of an elderly lyricist who gives up feeling the ever-changing pulse of modern times in his music, of a great American singer who joins the ranks of rock elders like Michael McDonald and Rod Stewart by giving up the life as a walker. jukebox oldies.
