Who knows where Rough and Rowdy Ways fits into his catalogue. It's his 39th album (his 39th lash?), and probably as good as anything he's produced in awhile (it depends on how you look at it), but I wouldn't want to move his albums around in a hierarchy -- it would be too much like f*cking around with a Rubik's Cube. Who needs the frustration or self-administered take-down of intelligence? Certainly, the album comes at a time of preoccupation with disease and death that the Pandemic has brought and when the crisis of American democracy smells of collapse. You worry when you read that the Wandering Jew was condemned to do the Johnny Walker until the onset of Christ's return -- i.e., the Apocalypse promised in Revelations -- and now he's stopped wandering.
But as we've all learned over the decades, it's senseless to read too deeply into Dylan's oeuvre -- probably you're projecting and exposing yourself to well-founded ridicule, like that moron in that famous 1962 interview who seemed to mistake Dylan for Barry McGuire (a Dylan imitator) and asked him to explain the deep meaning of "Eve of Destruction." It's an instructive interview, glaringly exposing what the Poor Bastard has been up against all these years, squeezed between the Press that wants to hold him accountable and the People who want him to save them. No wonder he ended up referring to himself as "a song and dance man." (Check it out: it's unbelievable.) Next to Lennon, no Pop Icon has ever had to put up with such sustained blatherscheissen.
The poet once sang, "I haven't known peace and quiet for so long / I can't remember what it's like." With Rough and Rowdy Ways, he seems to be one step closer to Beyond. One day, probably soon, we'll pick up the paper and read the obituary the Times has had on file and ready for many years. Thanks, Bob, for a lifetime of contradictions, insight-ments, and the strange solace, along the way, of emotional validation.
This article first appeared in Counterpunch magazine on July 10, 2020.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
