Six Degrees of Bob Dylan’s Desire
It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.
The Album
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What to make of an album called Desire about unjustly incarcerated boxers and disintegrating relationships and violent gangsters and island suicides? Released during America's bicentennial, Desire is an extremely cynical record, heavy on narrative and true crime, Dylan turning boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter (the epic opener "Hurricane") and gangster Joey Gallo ("Joey") into current-day Hattie Carrolls and Pretty Boy Floyds. (In the first volume of Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, he writes that just... after moving to New York City in the early '60s he spent so much time reading history books and old newspapers that for him, John Brown and Pretty Boy Floyd were current events. By the '70s, he had finally caught up.) Desire's mood is a peculiar one. The arrangements are lush, intricate and slightly dour, a kind of cowboy gothic. Scarlet Rivera's violin sighs like a desert wake and the percussion is held together by a string; it feels like a once-grand mansion fallen into eccentric disrepair, Sunset Boulevard set in McCabe and Mrs. Miller's broken West. It's a record about a land that time forgot. Dylan's extended narratives are suffocating and crammed with detail; there's a desperation to their intricacy, an unsaid acknowledgement that if he didn't tell this story, no one would. And that's what makes Desire such a strange record. It's both suspended in time an antique feel to the arrangements and yet Dylan is writing explicitly about real-world current events and coated in urgency, like Dylan's and Emmylou Harris' howls in "One More Cup of Coffee." That title keeps coming back: Desire. Death, deceit, sorrow and despair these are Desire's consequences, and we will see this strain run throughout these six albums.
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The Weathered Troubadour
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Always the weathered troubadour to Dylan's folk-boy, Kris Kristofferson wrote songs about living on the wrong side of the law and being a lothario, attaching his classic outlaw persona to the culture wars cresting when this, his debut album, was released in 1970. The record, not coincidentally, is an enormous bummer (and also incredible), from the nostalgic "Me and Bobby McGee" to the masterful "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down." (The "Mother's Little Helper"-like... "Blame It on the Stones" and the ribald "Best of All Possible Worlds" are both good fun, though.) Like Dylan with Desire, Kristofferson writes solely in narrative form; the songs don't evoke moods or emotions, they tell stories. A couple of years after this record's release, Kristofferson and Dylan got the chance to collaborate closely. The two co-starred in Sam Pecknipah's poorly received and since rehabbed Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, with Kristofferson playing Billy and Dylan taking a small role. Dylan even penned "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" for the film's score.
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The New York Counterpart
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In Chronicles once more, Dylan writes the following about visiting a Greenwich Village coffeehouse in the early '60s: "My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed. I sang with her a couple of times." Dalton was an aspiring folk singer at the time, a major talent looking for a break that, though it would take her some thirty... years to know it for sure, would never come. Still, it was not for lack of talent. In My Own Time, her 1971 second record, is a marvel, an impeccable example of the laconic sounds emerging from upstate New York, home to urban refugees and burned-out hippies looking for The Simple Life. With its easy drawls and comfort-food arrangements, In My Own Time perfectly captures that mood, from the country-blues of the title track to the weary shuffle of "Are You Leaving for the Country." But really it's the opener, "Something on Your Mind," that makes this record so essential. Dalton's voice stretched and squeaky with just a hint of that weird vocal tic that Dylan adopted for Nashville Skyline, it's one of the most distinctive vocals you will ever hear. It varies from barely audible to crackling with intensity, a sweeping fiddle always doubling it. (Very Desire.) Her voice is definitely not for everyone, but any Dylan fan will find oodles to love.
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The Fellow Poet
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Though Dylan meandered through every musical style imaginable, punk was not one of them. So how does Patti Smith, an important figure in punk's evolution, fit here? First, like Dylan, Smith's songwriting is highly literate; Horses draws from everything from Rimbaud to Wilhelm Reich to early Van Morrison, weaving together NYC street narratives, poetry and other cultural ephemera and detritus into a swirling statement of, well, something. Second, Smith, like Dylan, is... a visionary in the art of self-mythology. Both Dylan and Smith came of age in NYC at open-mic nights, scratching together performances, trying to find an audience. And both quickly learned that they needed an angle; for Dylan it was to become Woody Guthrie in the flesh, for Smith it was to live as if she was already a rock-star poet, her public life attuned to give off just the right impression. It's a very particular way of making it, and it takes the right personality to pull it off. Dylan and Smith share it. Finally, a December 1975 profile of Patti Smith in New Times Magazine begins: "She and Bob Dylan sit at the top of tile stairs at a hush-hush Greenwich Village party, trading whispers like two schoolboys." Dylan became a regular at a stint of shows she was playing at a club called the Other End in June of 1975; Dylan has gone so far as to credit Smith and her band for inspiring parts of Desire. It's a friendship that has lasted ever since.
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The Alt-Country Torchbearers
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The misanthropes and miscreants of Desire's lost days find companions with Uncle Tupelo's March 16-20, 1992, the band's sparse collection of traditional folk songs and originals. Broken-hearted coalminers, repentant convicts and Bible-thumpers haunt the record, cries of "Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down" echoing from the hollers and jaunty ditties about the awesome "Atomic Power" that will "decide the time [and] hour." But it's "Black Eye," the first moment Jeff Tweedy (later... of Wilco) really distinguished himself as a songwriter, that captures March's essence. Over a cascade of finger-picked guitars (very reminiscent of the Dylan classic "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright") Tweedy distantly observes a man broken or is that freed? by a black eye. It begins, "He had a black eye/ That he was proud of/ Like some of his friends/ Made him feel somewhere outside/ Of everything and everywhere he'd been." This could be Dylan's "Hurricane" talking. Musically, Uncle Tupelo's ambitious Anodyne (also wonderful) is a closer fit to Desire, but March 16-20 with its roots buried deeply in folk and Americana, its heart contentedly situated in misery and its themes tied to dying ways of life is much more a Dylan record. And it's pretty much perfect.
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