Dylan Can Still Find Something to Say--and a Way to Say It

In 1979, Bob Dylan professed to have been “born again” and, as proof, offered up the intensely religious “Slow Train Coming” album. That year he embarked on a tour in which he turned his back on his old testament of hits and concentrated exclusively on “Slow Train’s” new testament to his Christian faith.

A decade later, with much vinyl and soul searching under the bridge, Dylan seemingly has reached another career turning point, and along with it comes another watershed album, his superb new “Oh Mercy.” So what did he do last month at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa, on a new tour and having just completed one of the three or four best albums of his career? His oldies.

Ain’t that Just Like a Dylan?

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the new record is how, having astonished us time and again in the 27 years since his debut album, having explored every imaginable facet of literate rock music, Dylan can still be this amazing.

It’s not that the quality of his songwriting has eroded over the years. His best work in the ‘80s--the “Infidels” and “Empire Burlesque” albums--sits comfortably alongside his trailblazing achievements in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The difference, however, between the boundary-shattering, who-knew-that-rock-could-be-so-challenging work in the early ‘60s and the Dylan of 1989 is the difference between the first manned space mission and the 30th. Still remarkable but, barring an unforeseen Challenger-like disaster, routine.

Now, we know what is possible in the rock idiom. A generation of probing, pithy wordsmiths spawned by Dylan, from John Prine and Joni Mitchell to Elvis Costello and Randy Newman, have proven beyond a doubt that pop music can be as deeply touching and revelatory as poetry.

That said, I think most listeners, even those intimately familiar with Dylan’s catalogue, will be stunned at the level of artistry that infuses “Oh Mercy.”

It’s an album about love finding (or losing) its way in a world too preoccupied to notice it falling by the wayside. It’s about people watching perplexed as their dreams mysteriously dissipate despite their best intentions. And it’s about the struggle to maintain faith and hope in spite of such obstacles and frustrations.

There is also, however, a maturity of perspective that may well be lost on younger listeners. “Oh Mercy” is an album chiefly for those members of the “hope I die before I get old” generation who now fully understand that “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

The album opens with “Political World” and a theme stated in no uncertain terms:

We live in a political world

Where love don’t have any place

We’re livin’ in times where men commit crimes

And crime don’t have a face

Like each song that follows, “Political World” can be savored on a variety of levels, foremost the sheer power of the lyrics to make you straighten up in your chair and know that what Dylan’s singing is important.

Structurally, the song is a marvel for the way Dylan takes what may have been an off-the-cuff, barroom comment (“We live in a political world”) and details the ways it is apropos to (in turn) love, mercy, courage, peace, commitment, responsibility and humility.

And even when his idiosyncratic enunciation of lyrics leaves it unclear what he said on first listening, the context surrounding those blurred patches are so compelling I found myself repeatedly rewinding the tape to decipher every syllable I missed.

“Everything Is Broken” is another example of a statement made--by Dylan or to Dylan--in exasperation, which he then fleshed out with masterfully considered strokes. Like a Picasso drawing, the lines all seem superficially simple and obvious, yet when linked create a portrait that only could have been sketched by one man:

Broken bottles, broken blades

Broken switches, broken gates

Broken dishes, broken parts

Streets are filled, with broken hearts

Broken words never meant to be spoken

Everything is broken

Then, after three verses that make it unfurl like a clear-cut, cynical-yet-accurate litany of the world’s woes, Dylan adds a twist that transforms it into a song about the skewed, nothing-works viewpoint of an abandoned, lonely lover:

Every time you leave and go off some place

Things fall to pieces, in my face

Broken hands on broken plows

Broken treaties, broken vows

Broken pipes, broken tools

People bending broken rules

Hound dog howlin’, bullfrog croakin’

Everything is broken

While his use of language is as taut and skillful as ever, he’s no longer retreating safely behind the wall of dizzying images and obtuse metaphors that characterized his pioneering ‘60s material. Yet there is still plenty of interpretational ambiguity to satisfy the most ardent puzzle-solver.

Who is the mysterious titular character of “Man in the Long Black Coat,” with whom a woman abruptly disappears, leaving behind her small-town roots and obligations?

With the deftness of a short-story writer, Dylan sets up the scene and drops the clues, like pebbles to mark a trail for subsequent travelers.

Somebody seen him, hangin’ around

At the old dance hall, on the outskirts of town

He looked into her eyes, when she stopped him to ask

If he wanted to dance--he had a face like a mask

Somebody said from the Bible he’d quote

There was dust on the man in the long black coat

At first, it seems possible that a clandestine romance is the answer, but the increasingly foreboding imagery suggests much more.

Could he be the devil? Or maybe an angel; even the angel of death? Or, for that matter, Johnny Cash?

Where he might have spelled it out 25 years ago with a finger-pointing final verse, the 48-year-old Dylan refrains. Any answers we get from life, he seems to say between the lines, come not from placards or lofty pronouncements, but in dribbles, from bits and pieces of information and experience we encounter along the way.

This is all cast in a haunting, backwoods musical milieu established in no small part by producer Daniel Lanois, who also has worked with the Neville Brothers, Peter Gabriel and U2. And as evident elsewhere, Dylan has given more thought and effort to his vocals than he has in years--perhaps ever.

He sings “Man in the Long Black Coat” in clipped phrases when you would expect him to just reel off the lyrics because they are inherently so intriguing. But his delivery adds to the mystery, the feeling that something is happening and you do know what it is, eh, Mr. Jones?

In “Most of the Time,” he uses that phrase repeatedly to undercut his sense of emotional stability regained following the disintegration of a love affair. (Or is this, too, something more than just that?)

Most of the time

I’m halfway content

Most of the time

I know exactly where it all went

I don’t cheat on myself

I don’t run and hide

Hide from the feelings

That are buried inside

I don’t compromise

And I don’t pretend

I don’t even care

If I ever see her again

Most of the time

Dylan’s brilliance goes beyond the way he plants the phrase “most of the time” like a depth charge, adroitly capturing the lingering ambivalence toward a past, not-quite-forgotten love. It’s secret is in the straight-to-the-heart power that it maintains even after you come to anticipate the lyrical hook.

And if anyone has ever better projected the feelings of disorientation and alienation of a chilled relationship than Dylan does in “What Was It You Wanted,” I haven’t heard it. (It hardly matters whether he even intended it as a commentary on love derailed.)

Is the scenery changing?

Am I getting it wrong?

Is the whole thing going backwards?

Are they playing our song?

Where were you when it started?

Do you want it for free?

What was it you wanted?

Are you talking to me?

It would be just as easy to write at length about each of the album’s other five songs, and it feels like a disservice not to.

But the one consolation is that it’s almost as big a disservice to divorce these lyrics from their context and from the melodies, which are every inch the equal of the words and which is why “Oh Mercy” immediately has become the runaway leading contender on my album-of-the-year list.

In 1971, when he was in a comparatively fallow period, Dylan wrote “Watching the River Flow,” which began “What’s the matter with me? / I don’t have much to say.” It’s positively overwhelming to realize that so many years down the line he still has so much left to say, and the facility to say it so well.