Word: isn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dylan is great media. Unlike the Beatles, he isn't producing a sound, but rather a poetry with music worked in as an important cohering force and part of the emotional message. If D. A. Pennebaker's film on Dylan is any indication of the way he walks around thinking and talking (and I think it's close enough), then Dylan's mind is always popping with the same kind of surreal and often religious imagery that he strings together in his songs. And his desire to find out only what's true and his rabid hate for cant...
Look at what Dylan does with time. The past is sung as if it were just happening now. The present becomes the only kind of reality. The future isn't mentioned unless it's predetermined; if the future is determined, its reality is already there in the present. Take Dylan's story of God and Abe. As a historical anecdote it only has meaning in the way it relates to the present and in the way it is happening in slightly different contexts right now. So Dylan slips almost unnoticeably from "God said" to "God say." There's no difference...
...interviewed and photographed Country Joe a few weeks ago, we asked him what he thought of Dylan's new album. "You know," said Joe, "I used to really dig Dylan and what he was doing. The new album, I'm not really sure. That hillbilly stuff just isn't our kind of scene. You know, all those Okies." I figured he just missed the whole album. There is only one song, the last one, where the message is the Okie sound. Though that one really threw people because Dylan had never put anything like it on his albums before. When...
...wonders in his visions if life after death ("salvation") is a museum of all of history complete with sneezing old ladies looking at everything. He thinks that Dylan has a lot of gall for being so useless and all; but later asks anyone to show him a man who isn't a parasite. Get it? The message is, "Dylan's got no excuse. But the people making noise in the street are worse. So where do we go from here...
Side two of the album is the straight side. Dylan isn't hiding anything. "I pity the poor immigrant when his gladness comes to pass," is the last line of a beautiful song that rings true as one of the most accurate social observations of our time. "And I do hope you receive it well depending on the way you feel that you've lived," is one of several great lines in Dear Landlord explaining a philosophy of interaction between two dependent individuals. There's the suggestion that Dylan is talking about his relation to God (the landlord...