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Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways - Side B
“Creative ability is about pulling old elements together and making something new,” says Dylan in the Wall Street Journal interview, December 2022.
We know the stories about the man's encyclopaedic knowledge of and memory for songs, and have been hearing its fruits since his first record in 1962. The vast inner jukebox, the song treasure in his phenomenal working memory, plus his unerring sense of untapped gold in thirty centuries of world literature provide the “old elements” from which Dylan sculpted "Blowin’ In The Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin’", which gave us "All Along The Watchtower" and "Like A Rolling Stone", and which fill the tracklist of a late, next masterpiece some 60 years after that first Rough And Rowdy Ways, the then 79-year-old Nobel laureate's 39th studio album, released on 19 June 2020.
The three songs on Side B demonstrate that special skill, that talent for making “something new” out of “old elements” in extremis. Side B slaloms through the elegance of a nineteenth-century barcarolle, unconventional harmonies of a twenty-first-century expressionist and the solid blues stomp of a twentieth-century grandmaster of Chicago blues, through the work of a first-century Roman poet, past snatches from the Old Testament and old folk songs, the Decameron and country greats - and that's only a fraction of what the three songs offer.
In Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways - Side B, Dylan scholar Jochen Markhorst delves into the overwhelming lyrics, irresistible musical accompaniment, rich music-historical roots and literary brilliance of the three Dylan songs on that record side - and shows why the album belongs in the outer category of albums like Highway 61 Revisited, Blood On The Tracks and Time Out Of Mind.
We know the stories about the man's encyclopaedic knowledge of and memory for songs, and have been hearing its fruits since his first record in 1962. The vast inner jukebox, the song treasure in his phenomenal working memory, plus his unerring sense of untapped gold in thirty centuries of world literature provide the “old elements” from which Dylan sculpted "Blowin’ In The Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin’", which gave us "All Along The Watchtower" and "Like A Rolling Stone", and which fill the tracklist of a late, next masterpiece some 60 years after that first Rough And Rowdy Ways, the then 79-year-old Nobel laureate's 39th studio album, released on 19 June 2020.
The three songs on Side B demonstrate that special skill, that talent for making “something new” out of “old elements” in extremis. Side B slaloms through the elegance of a nineteenth-century barcarolle, unconventional harmonies of a twenty-first-century expressionist and the solid blues stomp of a twentieth-century grandmaster of Chicago blues, through the work of a first-century Roman poet, past snatches from the Old Testament and old folk songs, the Decameron and country greats - and that's only a fraction of what the three songs offer.
In Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways - Side B, Dylan scholar Jochen Markhorst delves into the overwhelming lyrics, irresistible musical accompaniment, rich music-historical roots and literary brilliance of the three Dylan songs on that record side - and shows why the album belongs in the outer category of albums like Highway 61 Revisited, Blood On The Tracks and Time Out Of Mind.
157 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 28, 2023
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