Hail to the thief

Finally, after five long years Bob Dylan once again took a little time out from his Neverending Tour and went straight into the hated recording studio to make another album. “Modern Times” it is called and for anyone who has followed Dylan’s trail during the last decade it won’t be any big surprise that this title is not meant to be any homage to the new millennium. Moreover, the cover, a 60 year old photograph by Ted Croner, suggests that hardcore-nostalgic Dylan is going to continue the way of song writing he took up with “Time Out Of Mind” and consolidated with 2001’s masterwork “Love and Theft”.

Actually, Dylan really didn’t put his thievery tools onto the shelf but continues his raid in times long ago, with maximum effort, as the album opener “Thunder on the mountain” with his Chuck Berry-riff demonstrates in an impressive manner. Also the cynical humour that could be found everywhere on “Love and Theft” hustles into the front row when Dylan aims for world domination with the help of some “tough sons of bitches”, laments that he would like to have “some real good woman who does what I say” just before he raises the question “what’s the matter with this cruel world today” right in the next line. At the same time “Thunder on the mountain” constitutes the last point of total light heartedness on this album. Afterwards the mood settles somewhere between those of the last two records which means gallows humour on one side and melancholy on the other one.

I’m surely not going to write an essay about every single track on this record because there are already far too many out there (on internet, in magazines and many other sources only known to some weirdoes spending their whole lives reading and contributing to Dylan message boards) - and most of them probably better than mine. Those essays will cover all the big names like Robert Johnson, Bing Crosby, Bessie Smith, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Henry Timrod and many many more, how the works of all those people influenced every single track on “Modern Times” and certainly endless discussions about if Bob Dylan should have quoted the original song-sources instead of claiming that all of the music and all of the lyrics were by himself when they evidently are not. Exactly the same discussion already came up five years ago with the release of “Love and Theft”. But the important thing is that Bob Dylan still has something to say and I really don’t care if he does it in his own words or with those of a confederate-poet from the 19^th century. As long as it won’t reduce the power of these records (and in fact it doesn’t) I just don’t care.

In my humble opinion there are some of the best songs Bob Dylan has ever recorded on “Modern Times”, performed with such a “clear” voice nobody who attended one of his shows during the past months would ever have expected to come out of this grumpy old man. Sure, even 45 years after the release of his first record, voices, claiming that he just cannot sing, still haven’t silenced. Actually, I think there’s just a handful of artists out there who are able to perform songs with the same emotionality and intensity as Dylan does night after night and especially on this record, on Modern Times.

If Bob Dylan keeps up his releasing rhythm, a new album can not be expected before the year 2010 or 2009 maybe. And two or three weeks before the release - as well as I did with the recent record - I will search through every possible Dylan message board to just find a link to hear some pre-released/leaked sound snippets or have a look at some text fragments. (I think I spent more time with listening to a sound-collage of Modern Times, containing of short clips of each song put together, than with 80 % of all the other records I bought this year.)

In an interview Dylan once stated that if he made music only for himself, he would solely play Charley Patton songs. Wouldn’t this be a great idea for a new record? I mean, he already borrows from all those great blues musicians all the time. So why not make a complete record full of Charley Patten songs!? Unfortunately, I’m sure that the chance to see such a record is indeed very very small. But for now we still have the Neverending Tour (Hands down, Bob Dylan surely will be on stage at least as long as Chuck Berry!), a fantastic radio show, the anticipation of “Chronicles Part Two” and a late work many musicians should take a lesson from. Headword: Growing old in dignity. Yeah, Rolling Stones, I’m looking in your direction.