Anti-Climacus

Bob Dylan was a surprisingly tough sell to me. The reasons now seem strange. I liked the 'quicksilver' sound of Highway 61 Revisited the first time I heard it. I owned Blonde on Blonde, Bringing It All Back Home, Blood on the Tracks, and liked a few tracks on each. I didn't mind the voice, or the extended lyrics, the country or blues inflections. Yet something about it didn't appeal to me.

The LP is a different way of organizing music, and one has to listen to music first made for an LP in a different way. This is especially true with double albums. The conventional LP holds about 20 minutes of music per side, but all four sides of a double album will fit on a CD. The coincidence of form leads to a natural enough mistake: listen to this album straight through.* It took me a long time to figure out not to do this, especially with a double album--at least, not if you want to appreciate it. But even with this knowledge, Blonde on Blonde languished.

Sometime over the summer I was finally in the position to appreciate "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," and listened to it--all 12 minutes and change--four or five times in a row. (It was not until much later, when I first played it all the way through on guitar, that I realized it was a love song.) This set the stage, and I listened avidly to Dylan through much of the fall.

For reasons not worth getting into, I found myself on the road the evening before Thanksgiving. In order to miss traffic, I avoided the interstate highways (a wise idea) and made my way through some very rural areas for a number of hours and well into the night. I drove through towns with one stoplight, past farms, alongside train tracks, and through at least one thoroughly unexpected city, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with charming downtown grid already prepared for the Christmas season but no one around. I was in what Greil Marcus called 'the old, weird America.' For the first hour of my drive, I listened to a CD or two, then Blonde on Blonde--I was not interested in changing the music, so I listened to the album over and over again. I can hardly hear this song without thinking of endless hills in souther Virginia.


*A number of bands retained the LP sensibility well into the age of the CD. R.E.M. albums always have two sides. Amongst others, there is little constancy: Nevermind has two clear sides, In Utero doesn't (I don't believe any Pearl Jam albums make this differentiation). Manic Street Preachers and Pulp never bothered with it, but the division between sides is key to The Bends and OK Computer. Guided By Voices never bothered, nor did Neutral Milk Hotel; Exile in Guyville (for obvious reasons) and ...To Bring You My Love both do. One could go on, but you get the idea.