Word: songs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Yale troupe invests the silly plot with style, wit and perfect timing. The score is something more-a Kurt Weill marvel. Not only were the famous Bilbao Song and Surabaya Johnny written for this musical, but also half a dozen other numbers of rare distinction. They range from Song of the Big Shot ("Just don't get soft, baby/ For god's sake never get soft, baby/ No ifs or buts/ Go on and kick him in the guts/ Go on and kick him in the guts. ") to Throw Out the Lifeline-Soul Overboard. By turns, the music...
...jealousy, revenge, robbery and murder in the Old West. But it only tells us so much; most of the "plot" is missing or only present obliquely. We never find out who the Jack of Hearts is, or what happens to him when it's all over. You feel the song could be twenty times as long: there's room for that much more detail. What Dylan has included is just a slice out of what's in his mind--the same kind of feeling you had about songs like "Memphis Blues Again" or "Desolation Row," that there must be dozens...
...music is subordinate to interest in his new lyrics and in his present state of mind. But it's good to have the familiar musical background back--the harmonica that moves in to replace the voice when the words are over, the organ mounting upwards, giving the song a solid feeling and making the long, wordy lines seem to rise and fall in a grand rhythm. Dylan's voice on Blood on The Tracks is somewhere between the hard rasp of his classic period and the mellower country tones he affected after John Wesley Harding. The new combination...
...HARD NOT TO read some self-criticism into that last pair of alternatives. Dylan's abandoned the super-sensitivity of the song-writer who has to turn everything into precise images and clusters of associations, but the "softness" of the pose that followed is likewise cloying. "If You See Her, Say Hello" and "Shelter From The Storm" are over simple: not quite sensitive enough and a little too soft. It's a delicate balance he wants to strike, but when Dylan achieves it, it seems worth all the trouble...
...little of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" but it's sad to see Dylan reduced to saying "Life is sad" and affecting a Marlboro-country tough-guy stance about it, offering the comfort of superior sexual performance to his "honey baby." Even "Tangled Up In Blue," the second-best song on the album, can only offer something that sounds like it comes off a poster...