Tag: Paul Simon

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Exactingly Planned: Paul Simon’s Hallmark Card

What makes this music connect is Simon’s ability to make a spiritual setting feel down-to-earth, what you might expect from one of American pop music’s greatest conversational songwriters. “I heard two cows in a conversation/One called the other one a name/In my professional opinion/All cows in the country must bear the blame,” Simon sings, showing us that he hasn’t lost his sense of humor, however somber the setting.  Rolling Stone

There are red flags here.  Not stop signs– but red flags.

Back to the cows: this is witty?

Here is a review I find more trustworthy (not because it disagrees but because I suspect it is a less compromised source.)  The Guardian.

Here are some lyrics from Simon’s previous album (the song: “Love is Eternal Sacred Light”):

Love is eternal sacred light
Free from the shackles of time
Evil is darkness, sight without sight
A demon that feeds on the mind

Really?  Love is light, evil is darkness?  Fifty years of kicking around New York City, touring, writing and recording songs, partying with the glitterati, hobnobbing with the elite minds of our culture, and your opus starts to look like Hallmark cards?  “A demon that feeds on the mind”?

A college English professor would immediately ask the obvious question:  “how is it like a demon that feeds on the mind?”  And yes, Simon latest work is the very definition of sophomoric.

“Free from the shackles of time”?  What does that even mean?

This is not new for Simon: it’s the updated self-conscious posturing of “So Long Frank Lloyd Wright” and “El Conder Pasa” and “American Tune”.  It sadly reminds me of the faux profundity of Mumford and Sons.  It is Simon trying to sound like Leonard Cohen, or like himself writing “The Sound of Silence”, a song that barely escapes pretentiousness–but does– because of its vivid imagery (“the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls/and tenement halls” is pretty good even if familiar).

Or how about this (from Seven Psalms):

Dip your hand in Heaven’s waters
God’s imagination
Dip your hand in Heaven’s waters
All of life’s abundance in a drop of condensation
Dip your hand in Heaven’s waters

Oh come on!  It sounds like Leonard Cohen on an off day, like something you wouldn’t even see in his notebooks on display at the Leonard Cohen museum, wherever it is.  It’s banal.  It’s pathetic.  It is transparently calculated to sound like something that sounds profound.

All right Simon– you want to get “spiritual”?  You want to sound like this (Leonard Cohen doing the real thing)?

If it be your will, that I speak no more
And my voice be still, as it was before
I shall speak no more, I shall abide until
I am spoken for, if it be your will

Or compare it to earlier Simon, perhaps his most telling song of all:

Takin’ time to treat your friendly neighbors honestly
I’ve just been fakin’ it
I’m not really makin’ it
This feeling of fakin’ it
I still haven’t shakin’ it

No, you haven’t.

Watch the video on the Guardian’s website above.  It’s brilliant, but not in the way most people think it is.  Everybody I know will come away from it impressed with what a musical genius Paul Simon is not because the video proves he is a musical genius but because a sophisticate like Paul Simon knows exactly how to push those buttons– scenes of him trying out various exotic instruments, apparently directing the strings, coaching a choir, giving the impression that he is way more of a musical genius than you thought, in full control of every aspect of his music.  It takes a cur like me to notice that it does not show that he is a musical genius– that takes actual music– but just that he knows how to look like one.  The corresponding musical tracks are all refinement and almost no invention.

Firstly, I don’t know of many reputable critics who would credit Simon as a one of pop music’s “greatest conversational songwriters”.  Well, pardon me, now I do.  But I have never forgotten what is perhaps the most pungent back-hand compliment I’ve ever read in reference to a singer-songwriter, in regard to “The Boxer”:  “one of Paul Simon’s few unpretentious songs”.  A remark that incisive and accurate doesn’t die– I’ve remembered it for 40 years, and always when I am listening to Simon.  It used to be a consistent gripe about Simon’s work.  Has he aged out of those critics?  As I hear snatches of Simon’s newest work, his “farewell” (we’ll see), it lives on.  “The Boxer” remains his best song.  Simon was a fine song-writer with regrettable tendencies and a thin skin.   His latest work is a drag on his oeuvre.

Simon sings “the lord is a meal for the poorest, a welcome door to the stranger…. The Covid virus is the Lord/The Lord is the ocean rising.”  Seriously? This passes for poetic lyrics nowadays?  Look folks: those are banal images.  They are over and done with in a flash.  How is the Lord a “meal” for the poorest?  And if he is– one might speculate, a “meal”– charity– or a “welcome door” — hospitality– how is he also global warming (“the ocean rising”)?  Is the listener supposed to fill in the gaps?  (One thinks of a far better aphorism: “the opiate of the masses”.)  They don’t evoke anything more than sophomoric ramblings skipping the detail work, the specifics, the real experiences and incidents that inspire real poetry, and sliding right into the aphorism.

There is mystery, oh yes.  The mystery is, why does the New York Times critic think this is deep stuff?  It is actually banal.  Simon adopts phrases from Cohen, I would suggest, but he doesn’t have the gravitas to fill it with meaning.  Cohen brilliantly anchors his spirituality in his carnal impulses: “She tied you to her kitchen chair/She broke your throne and she cut your hair/and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah”.  That’s how you get to Hallelujah.  Not through mumbling warmed-over vaguely spiritual platitudes or “the lord is the water rising”..  Simon gives the impression of having glossed over a Reader’s Digest “Today’s Spiritual Sayings” page.  How about something like “religion is a smile on a dog”, a far more rich, allusive image.  Ironically from Edie Brickell.  (Along with “philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks” and “religion is a light in the fog”.  Both more striking than Simon’s “the Lord is a virgin forest/the Lord is the earth I ran on”.)

The New York Times observes:  “its informality is exactingly planned.”  That’s what some of us have never liked about Simon.  I am surprised that the Times followed that comment up with generous praise.  Yes, Simon emits more platitudes about forgiveness and acceptance without once identifying a single sin.

Simon is a very good songwriter, but he is never not conscious of himself as “a poet and a one-man band” and never just a “one-man band”.  He’s always had a grievance about not being regarded as just as great as Bob Dylan or The Beatles or Billy Joel (he is greater than Billy Joel, but leave that aside for now).

And it appears that the Guardian and Rolling Stone and New York Times bought it.   Yeah, you have to be pretty fucking arrogant to call them out, but I do: they have been far too credulous.  It is possible, considering that Simon is near the end of life, to be generous without being slavish.  Go back and try again.

Here’s more:

When he and Brickell finish this expansive work by harmonizing, “Children, get ready/It’s time to come home/Amen,” it has the kind of finality you expect from a great composer summoning many decades of accrued wisdom.

I hate it when musicians bring their wives or children into their recordings, even if, as in the case of Brickell, that person has had a career in her own right.  It reeks of privilege.  It is an insult to the usual talents that fill those spaces on recordings by notable artists.  It always feels to me like “honey, why can’t I be on your album?”  It draws the mind to McCartney’s embarrassing attempts to put Linda in Wings.  I remember Neil Young performing with Emmy Lou Harris and Michele Shocked and his wife Pegi and felt sure that Harris and Shocked must have felt more than a little insulted at the idea that Young’s wife belonged in that chorus.

The lord is my engineer / The Lord is my record producer

And let’s identify the obvious: is Simon taking another note from Leonard Cohen here?  If he is, one immediately suspects he took note of the esteem Cohen has earned over the years for his overtly spiritual references (among a host of carnal allusions) and decided to weigh in with one of his own.  Rolling Stone acts if listeners should be delightfully surprised.  No, but here’s a list of things that could have been on a Paul Simon album that would have surprised me:

  • an appearance by Art Garfunkel
  • an unpretentious song
  • a cover of “Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols
  • a reboot of “Fakin’ It”
  • a cover of “Cold, Cold Ground” by Tom Waits
  • an apology for “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard”

What even I would never expect: a cover of a Bob Dylan song.  My theory is that Simon would fear that it would draw a contrast and comparison to his own work– unfavorably.  I remember wandering through Germany somewhere and stumbling into a coffee shop and listening to some good singer-songwriter tunes on the radio when “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” by Dylan came on.  It’s not one of his greatest songs, but even minor Dylan in that context was strikingly superior to everything before and after that was not Dylan.  I suspect Simon would be worried about the same effect if he jammed a Dylan track into the middle of several of his own.

I am surprised at Rolling Stone rolling over on this one.  Who got to them?  What’s in it for “Rolling Stone”?

Paul Simon’s best album, as an album, remains Bookends.  Quintessentially hip, polished, sophisticated, expertly produced and recorded, the most distinctively Simon and Garfunkelish of all the Simon and Garfunkel albums.  Should be in record box of every English major in America, at least in their sophomore year.   Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Time is a fine album.  Just fine.   “A Poem on the Underground Wall” is under-rated.  Bridge Over Troubled Waters has too much junk on it, like “Cecilia” and “Baby Driver”– a vain attempt to rock.  There Goes Rhymin’ Simon can’t be forgiven for “Was a Sunny Day” and the fey title.  One Trick Pony was as horrible as the movie.  Graceland (1986) seemed like an attempt to transform Simon into a musician’s musician inspiring admiration and envy for the funky African textures that, weirdly, echoed Neil Diamond’s Tap Root Manuscript from 1970.  Both of them resonate uncomfortably today.

For the record, in my opinion, Paul Simon’s best songs:

  • The Boxer
  • The Sound of Silence
  • Mrs. Robinson
  • Hazy Shade of Winter
  • Fakin’ It
  • A Poem on the Underground Wall
  • Patterns
  • America
  • You Can Call Me Al
  • Hearts and Bones
  • The Only Living Boy in New York

Over-Rated

  • Bridge Over Troubled Waters
  • Mother and Child Reunion
  • Graceland

Worst (and over-rated)

  • Cecilia
  • 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
  • Loves Me Like a Rock
  • Me and Julio Down by the School Yard

The Excretable

  • Feelin’ Groovy

If you thought “Graceland” was special, please consider “From Galway to Graceland” by Richard Thompson to see how musical allusions to Presley’s monument to self-indulgence should be done.

And my traveling companions
Are ghosts and empty sockets
I’m looking at ghosts and empties
But I’ve reason to believe
We all will be received
In Graceland

Simon writes about ghosts and empty sockets and ghosts and empties who will all be “received” at Graceland.  I suppose it suggests that Presley’s mansion provides America with almost a religious symbol of aspiration, to be “received”, perhaps blessed, redeemed, forgiven.  Okay– obviously, I’m filling in the blanks.  There are lot of blanks to be filled in.  Simon’s lyrics are unspecific and unattached.  They are tropes without gravity.

Try this:

She was humming Suspicion,
That’s the song she liked best
She had Elvis I Love You
Tattooed on her breast

The lyrics are too good to leave these out:

Ah, they came in their thousands
From the whole human race
To pay their respects
At his last resting place
But blindly she knelt there
And she told him her dreams
And she thought that he answered
Or that’s how it seems

I get chills just copying and pasting them.

Simon is very good at creating the perception that he is a serious, thoughtful, imaginative, original talent.  He has written a few fine songs, but I think he is not capable of the kind of powerful, original evocative piece like Thompson’s “Galway to Graceland”.  It’s instructive how the two songs are different.  Simon evokes a sense of solidarity with the communal nostalgia for the fantasy represented by a crass monument to Elvis Presley’s popular success.   But he doesn’t regard it as crass.  He’s playing to a touchstone of Americana without probing it’s implications, the vanity, the superficiality of Presley’s later career.   Thompson, in contrast, probes deeply into the delusions at the heart of the worship of Presley’s corrupt later persona.  He observes, unlike Simon who genuflects.  He gets into the mind of a fan and explores: what is she sees in Elvis?  How does it relate to the dreariness of her own real world?  How is Elvis’s public image a communal delusion of intimacy and familiarity?  What happens if it plays out, as it does in the song?  It’s a work of genius.  Simon’s “Graceland” is a work of terminal niftiness.

Another version of the good one.  Simon’s version is about Simon suggesting to us that he has deep thoughts about Elvis.  Thompson’s song really is deep, because it is about a fan, and Elvis’ tarnishing effect on fandom, and how the illusions this relationship creates can be damaging and disturbing.  The rock’n’roll rebel who congealed into the obese depressed shallow figure who died on the toilet, constipated to death by voluminous prescription drugs and surrounded by sycophants who can’t bear to tell him the truth about himself.

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Deportees

On January 29, 1948, the New York Times ran a story about a plane crash in California in which 32 people died, 28 Mexicans, and four Americans. The four Americans were identified by names and professions. The Mexicans were merely identified as “deportees”.

Woody Guthrie read the article and thought about those Mexicans. He thought about their wives and children and girlfriends, and about the way they risked their lives at times to cross over into the U.S. illegally to try to make some money to send home to their families. He thought about how they were often exploited and cheated by their “coyotes” (guides), and sometimes abandoned to die in the dessert. He thought that they deserved to have names.

He wrote the lyrics for “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos Canyon)” and recited the piece at some performances. Ten years later, a school teacher named Martin Hoffman took Guthrie’s poem and wrote a melody for it. Pete Seeger covered it and it became a hit.

It’s a beautiful song. It’s flawed (that last didactic verse isn’t necessary)– like the faces of many great beauties– but it has a zen-like clarity to it that entrances. It builds slowly, laying out the scene, literally and metaphorically, and then hammering home it’s point with

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

“Both sides of the river, we died just the same” may the most eloquent summation of a liberal, progressive attitude that I have ever seen. This is not about war between illegals and native sons, or Mexicans and Americans, or the owners and the dispossessed. It’s about how we treat each other as human beings. It’s about the dignity of the laborer, and the hypocrisy of a culture that openly hates illegal immigrants but depends on them to harvest their crops, look after their children, and wash their cars.

One measure of the greatness of a song is its enduring appeal. Is there another song that has retained such a high degree of relevance? Up to 500 Mexicans die every year trying to cross the border illegally to do work that Americans won’t do, for willing employers. In return, they are treated like “outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves”.

How do I acknowledge 9/11? With this tribute to “Deportees”.

In 2005, more than 500 Mexicans died trying to cross over into the U.S. illegally.

Deportee on Wiki

Best version? I have an ensemble version that I adore that is attributed to “Woody Guthrie”– obviously, the song-writer– with no further information about the performers. Sounds like early Weavers, but it’s not them. Lists of songs performed and recorded by the Weavers do not list “Deportee”.

Dolly Parton did a version, on her album “9 to 5”. I will remind you that she was quite a good singer before the industry got their fangs into her style.

The only “tribute” to 9/11 I could really stomach to watch was the curious performance of Paul Simon, at Ground Zero, of “The Sounds of Silence”. As he sang,

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.

the camera cut to a shot of the American flag draped on a nearby office tower. Very curious. Simon didn’t change a word– good man!– so we were left with an image of the “words of the prophets” written on the subway walls and tenement halls.

We know from another Paul Simon’s songs (“A Poem on the Underground Wall”) what one of those words was.

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Five Perfect Songs

There are five perfect songs. Here they are:

  • Sam Stone (John Prine)
  • All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
  • Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
  • I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
  • You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore)

That’s it.

About Sam Stone:
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local heroe’s hill

“Suspicion” (Elvis Presley) comes close, but no cigar.

Other Honorable Mentions:

“Reelin’ in the Years” (Steely Dan) A truly awesome recording but I can’t overlook the pettiness of “the things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand…”

“Homeward Bound” (Simon and Garfunkel) a fine, fine song, but “all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity” is a little precious.

“Four Strong Winds” (Ian & Sylvia) is a bit slight, so you have to repeat the chorus and that gives it a bit of a sense of aimlessness and repetition and violates the rule of economy.

The Beatles’ best song is “Girl”:

Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said,
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he’s dead?

But “Eleanor Rigby” is also very nearly perfect.

“Go Your Own Way” (Fleetwood Mac) is too slight.

“Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits is very, very good.

“Echo Beach” (Martha & the Muffins) Actually, this song is darn near perfect as well. Darn near.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (The Band) Great, great song, but a bit murky, and the Band’s own recording of it is not as perfect as the song. As is “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Tears of Rage”. I do actually like the cover version of “Dixie” by Joan Baez, featuring crack Nashville session musicians. It’s from an album that appeared to be an effort by Baez to reach out to the alienated silent majority of Americans who seemed to despise her.

Levon Helm (who wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) despised her version, but one suspects that that is because Levon Helm despised Joan Baez.

“Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) Okay. So this one is perfect too. Six perfect songs. But it has to share with “Light My Fire” (Doors).

“Like a Rolling Stone” (Bob Dylan) Violates rule of economy, but also a great, great song. “Tangled up in Blue” might actually be a better song.

“Thunder Road” (Bruce Springsteen) Can’t sustain that great take-off, “you can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain” though he tries, brilliantly. In the end, it’s just a trifle indulgent, a trifle too self-consciously monumental. A trifle. On some days I prefer “Jungleland”.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (Bob Dylan) is as good or better than any other song on the list. All right, seven.

“One of These Days” (Emmy Lou Harris) Lovely, enchanting piece, reminds me of “As I Went Out One Morning” (Bob Dylan): both are elegantly economical, tight, balanced.

“Someday Soon” (Judy Collins) Okay– another one. Eight.

All right: 9– “The Hammond Song”, by the Roches. Actually, this song is obviously flawed, but there are moments when it does sound just perfect to me. So 8. Wait — 9. I forgot about one of the most perfect, crystalline, renditions ever: “Wayfarin’ Stranger” by Emmy-Lou Harris with that absolutely wonderful lead by Tony Rice and mandolin by Albert Lee.

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Precious Paul Simon

The problem, always, with Paul Simon is that lurking behind every clever turn of phrase and every strong image is the college sophomore desperately trying to call your attention to one line or another written specifically to have attention called to it. Simon’s a good writer– sometimes an excellent writer. The pitch-perfect tone of “Homeward Bound” cannot be denied. But for every “on a tour of one-night stands/my suitcase and guitar in hand” there’s a “like a rat in a maze” (“Patterns”) or a “you read your Emily Dickenson/ and I my Robert Frost” (“Dangling Conversation”). And you cringe a little.

A critic once referred to “The Boxer” as “one of Paul Simon’s few unpretentious songs”. I thought that was right twenty years ago and it seems more right now. That means I can throw on a CD of 20 or 25 Paul Simon songs and thoroughly enjoy them… about once every two years. Try not to think about whether “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright” proves his sophistication, or “El Condor Pasa” his world-weary sensitivity.

One of his better songs– though I barely noticed it for years– is “A Poem on the Underground Wall”. Typically, it’s not a novel concept or a highly original insight: graffiti as some kind of authentic urban poetry. In this case, I liked the last verse, as the hyperventilating bum slashes onto an advertising poster “a poem/comprised of four letters”.

The author of the poem is one of those vaguely ghostly, invisible personages that inhabit the landscape of urban decay and disillusionment, a ragged man, a shadow, who races away, his heart beating madly, after making his “statement”. Simon has the sense to stop the poem before it becomes too weighty, though he needlessly conjures an image of the vagrant being suckled by the “breast of darkness”. Yes, there’s the preciousness. You could never imagine Dylan doing that line.

Simon has occasionally slyly complained about being taken less seriously, or monumentally, than Dylan. That’s why. That and the fact that Simon’s best five songs wouldn’t crack Dylan’s best 25. But it’s a good song. The urban world back in 1965 seemed madly in love with regimentation, conformity, mindless consumption, and the endless pursuit of trivial gratifications even as it rotted from within. It seems even more so today and the pathos and futility of the four-letter poem seems even more poignant. A casualty talks back. Ten years later, maybe he occupied a Harry Chapin song: Sniper.

In an earlier song:

And the sign flashed out it’s warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said the words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And echoed in the Sounds of Silence.

Okay. Bit cheesy. But most clichés exist for a good reason. Somewhere in the faint, dark echo of their original inspirations lies something true and interesting.

 

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Bob Dylan’s Voice

Bob Dylan performed a concert in Montreal on July 8th, 1988. He was so bad the audience booed him off the stage. Humiliated and disgraced, he retired from all public performances, though he continued to write brilliant, searing songs like “The Man in the Long Black Coat” for other artists who knew how to sing, like Joan Osborne.

Yeah. Right. Never happened.

It almost happened, once. In 1965, in New York, an audience expecting an acoustic, folkie Dylan, rebelled when he brought the Hawks, an eclectic electric band, on stage with him, and drilled into “Like a Rolling Stone”. He survived the heckling and came back for an encore, with his acoustic guitar, and played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”. On a subsequent tour of England, he encountered more booing and heckling. Still, the majority of the audiences sat back and listened and applauded at the end of each number. More importantly, they paid for their tickets. Dylan sold out every venue.

There is something bizarre about the 1988 concert in Montreal. He is not as bad as you sometimes think he is—his version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is fascinating and passionate—but he certainly is not “singing”. He shouts and honks and garbles and inhales and mumbles and wails and barks. Is he really good at shouting and honking and garbling and inhaling and mumbling and wailing and barking? It wouldn’t be hard to find someone who is way better at it than he is.

If Dylan is so bad, why does he continue, in 1999, to sell out every venue? Maybe I’m stupid. Maybe I’m completely wrong about singing. Maybe this shrieking from the bowels of hell really is quite beautiful and interesting.

It is interesting that he is currently touring with Paul Simon, who wrote this cute little tribute in 1966:

I knew a man whose brain’s so small
Couldn’t think of nothing at all
Not the same as you and me
Doesn’t dig poetry
He’s so un-hip that when you say “Dylan”
He thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas,
Whoever he was. Why the man aint got no culture!
But it’s all right ma, everybody must get stoned….
… I lost my harmonica, Albert….

“Albert” is probably a reference to Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman (who also managed Peter, Paul, and Mary). The song, “A Simple Desultory Philippic”, was one of those petty, vindictive little pieces that result when an artist is jealous of the recognition given to a rival. Simon also once commented that he wanted to earn more respect from critics but couldn’t train his voice to scream with the proper intensity. Artful sarcasm from a man accustomed to accompanying Art Garfunkel, one of the truly gorgeous voices of pop music.

Dylan responded a few years later with a hilarious parody of “The Boxer”, doing both Simon and Garfunkel’s voices, equally preposterously. For the record, I should inform you that some critics believe the Dylan version, released on the disastrous double-album Self Portrait, was a “tribute” to his “good friend” Simon. Hmmm. It might well have been both.

It was the Beatles who first noticed that the audience no longer cared about the musical quality of the live performance. It came to them at the height of their career, when they were selling out Shea Stadium and other acoustic hellholes. They discovered that the audience screamed and howled during their entire sets. If you are screaming and howling you aren’t listening. You certainly aren’t trying to notice pitch or rhythm or harmony. You aren’t thinking: “hmmm, seems to me Ringo’s lost a fraction of a second on his timing there…” In other words, they discovered that audiences did not actually come to the concert to hear the music. They were there to see their idols live, on stage, and scream, and get hysterical, and experience the phenomenon of super-stardom up close and personal. Well, as up close and personal as you get when the nearest seat that is available to the general public is about 100 feet away from the stage.

Thank you pop fans. It is because of your mindless devotion that many musicians feel quite comfortable ambling out on stage an hour or two late. You can tell when the concert is about to begin: the rich and privileged take their seats, at last, directly in front of the stage. The seats that you can’t get even if you camp in front of the primary ticket outlet for three days and buy the very first tickets (and pay an exorbitant “handling” fee). You will find that the very first tickets are for seats x and y in row 66. Where did all the other tickets go? The parasites and vampires who run the ticket agencies have them. You think they’re actually going to sell them to you? No way! Not even after charging you preposterous “service” fees to take your money and make you wait. (Kudos to Pearl Jam who has been fighting this system, without much success, for years).

Dylan discovered that he could be rude and snarly and arrogant, and people would still be wild for him and the critics would still worship him. He discovered that he could treat his friends like dirt and still be admired and respected. He discovered that he could be selfish and annoying and hypocritical, and it didn’t matter: his fans would line up on schedule and fork over their $25 or $35 or $45 or $65 to see him live. He discovered that he could paint! No kidding. He did a cover for “The Band”, and for his own “Self-Portrait”. It’s this kind of cubist pastiche that you are supposed to think is the product of genius because it breaks so many rules of conventional art. Actually, his paintings are crummy. He must have realized that eventually– you don’t see many Bob Dylan art shows lately.

And he discovered that he could sing like a howling weasel and it still didn’t matter.

Of course the critics were not fooled….

Well, of course they were.

You see, at one time, Dylan could sing. Quite well, in fact.

But in the 1960’s, people who admired Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett thought that Dylan couldn’t sing. But these people didn’t know a thing about the blues or folk, so they could be readily dismissed as narrow-minded and ignorant. But more sophisticated jazz and folk critics like Robert Shelton, Nat Hentoff, and Greil Marcus lauded Dylan for his originality and brilliance. And they were right, about the Dylan of the 1960’s. Listen to him on his early albums, on “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” or “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All right”, or “Motopsycho Nightmare” or “Visions of Johanna”. He is not merely good. He is often brilliant, astonishing, breath-taking. He was the most original talent of his time. He could even be tender and melodious—listen to all of Nashville Skyline and “Tangled up in Blue”.

So let’s not get confused here—I’m not one of those people who believe that Dylan never could sing.

In the 1980’s, critics who admired Nat Hentoff and Greil Marcus and didn’t understand the difference between audaciousness and audacity, took up the torch and praised Dylan’s art. The more obscure and obtuse and incoherent, the better—the less likely the common man was going to mistake their admiration for mere pretentiousness.

Now, I’m going to tell you a very shocking and amazing fact: Bob Dylan, today, sounds like garbage. No, it’s not your ears fooling you–he really does sound like garbage. He sings with the melodic artfulness of a blast furnace. He sings with the rhythmic inventiveness of a stuffed fish. He sings with banality and monotony. He’s not even clever with his phrasing anymore.

What happened? Dylan has always lived an insular life and has never had the self-respect to associate with people as smart or smarter than himself. Think of the enormous stress the adulation he received in the early 1960’s put on his personal relationships. He cast aside Joan Baez. He ridiculed Phil Ochs. He dumped loyal friends and associates who dared to imply anything less than full-hearted worship and admiration. He surrounded himself with people of unquestioning loyalty and mindless devotion. So when he finished a concert or a new album or some particularly weird movie performance and asked these people, “how’d I do?” I doubt very much he heard anything but comments like the following:

“Great, Bob.”

“Brilliant again, Bob!”

“Had ‘em eating out of your hand, Bob.”

And Dylan sits there thinking, “Man, I thought I stunk, but I guess I was really great. Must have been great—sold out again, in 40 cities.”

Dylan now plays Vegas. Dylan now belongs in Vegas.