Bob Dylan's songs have intrigued, inspired and haunted me as long as I can remember, and after a few years in my teens when I struggled to come to terms with his unique brand of vocalism, I have held him in equally high esteem as a performer. I make that distinction because even at this late date, one often hears remarks praising him as a songwriter but dismissing or denigrating his voice and performing style. For me, Dylan is simply the most important American artist of the post-WWII era, maybe of the last century. This may seem an odd conclusion coming from someone who makes his living in the world of classical music, and who continually harps on the importance of legato and evenness of vocal emission as sacrosanct values in his own field.
But of course, Bob Dylan isn't in the same field at all, and can't be judged by the values of beauty that apply in classical music, or folk, rock, jazz or even mainstream pop music as it is currently understood and practiced. Like every really great artist, he has created from his own vision, and what he has produced must be accepted (or not) on the basis of that vision. That Dylan has been not only idolized, analyzed, and imitated but also derided, called a fake, attacked and labeled a has-been by at least three generations is nearly the central axiom of his career. Look at Martin Scorsese’s wonderful documentary No Direction Home if you want to get an idea of the intensity of the poles of worship/hatred, identification/rejection, adulation/ damnation that Dylan evoked from his listeners in the mid-60s. Nobody has been called a sell-out, nobody has been simply counted out as many times, for as many reasons. Currently, he is somewhat back in favor. His last three studio albums, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, and Modern Times, have been received ecstatically by press and fans alike, and a recent multi-CD set of alternate takes and unreleased studio and live material, entitled Tell Tale Signs, has also elicited much more positive reaction than such compendiums of odds and ends usually do.
Still, most people know Dylan’s early songs best, the ones from the years 1963-1966, during which he went from being an unknown folk singer in Greenwich Village to being the most famous rock singer/songwriter in the world. (Sorry, Mick and Sir Paul, you were famous too, but in those days as members of groups.) “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Just Like a Woman,” “Mr. Tambourine Man” – these are part of the cultural lingua franca. But have you heard “Blind Willie McTell,” “Brownsville Girl,” “Series of Dreams,” “Ring Them Bells,” “Mississippi,” or “Standing in the Doorway?”: OK, if you’re a diehard Dylan fan, you have, but if not, then probably not. And believe me, reader, these songs are just as good as the ones you do know, maybe ever better.
All of which leads me to “Red River Shore,” Disc One, track 5 of Tell Tale Signs. The song was recorded during the January 1997 sessions for Time Out of Mind, but didn’t make it onto the album as finally released. This happens frequently with Dylan, most famously when “Blind Willie McTell” was left off the decidedly uneven 1983 album Infidels, much to the consternation of those who had heard it at the recording sessions. “Blind Willie McTell” was finally released on a compilation eight years later. With “Red River Shore,” it’s taken eleven years for the track to see the light of day. The song shares a title with an old Kingston Trio tune which the young Dylan no doubt heard in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, but the song is utterly different. Basically, it’s Schubert’s Winterreise in seven and a half minutes, a devastating statement of a life both wasted and redeemed by lost love and its remembrance. And the sound of the voice that sings it! Somebody said (I’m paraphrasing, I can’t find the quote) that if Dylan’s voice has always been like a rickety old shack, nowadays it’s like the floorboards of the shack have caved in. Phrases like “cadaverous yowl,” and “death rattle” figure prominently in recent descriptions of his vocal timbre.
The song begins, after a short guitar/bass introduction, with that sepulchral voice intoning a generalization that somehow seems uncannily personal:
Some of us turn off the lights and we live
In the moonlight shooting by.
Some of us scare ourselves to death
To be where the angels fly.
A little shiver at that, and we say yes, that’s what Dylan has always done; that’s why we listen to him. He then goes on to describe, with a nod to traditional folk music diction, the “pretty maids all in a row, lined up outside my cabin door,” but explains that he’s never wanted any of them “’cept the girl from the Red River Shore.”
As other instruments (organ, drums, accordion, dobro) join the successive verses like bystanders gathering around to hear the tale, Dylan, like Schubert and Müller, gives us the barest outlines of the relationship. When the singer professes his love, the girl advises him to “go home and lead a quiet life.” The line, as delivered by Dylan, is both heartbreaking and very funny. Their face-to-face relationship seems to end there in Verse 2 with that withering kiss-off, but the song goes on to outline a life of longing and devotion far too complex to describe as a delusional obsession. As always in his best songs, Dylan shows us every side of a contradiction. “The dream dried up a long time ago,” and yet she was “true to life, true to me.” He sings about the “thousand nights ago” when he lay in her arms, and we feel the pull of doubt. Did it ever happen? Does it matter?
Late in the song, he goes back to the place he met her, to “straighten it out.”
Everybody I talked to who’d seen us there
Said they didn’t know who I was talkin’ about.
OK, this is getting seriously weird. Did she exist at all? And then again we ask, does it matter?
The last verse cleverly hearkens back not only to Dylan the young folkie, but Dylan the born-again Christian who managed to piss off so many of his fans in the early 80s. But here the reference to Christ is both subtle and, in the context of the song, utterly natural. I have to quote this verse in full:
Now, I’ve heard of a guy who lived a long time ago
A man full of sorrow and strife.
Whenever someone around him died and was dead
He knew how to bring ‘em on back to life.
Well, I don’t know what kind of language he used
Or if they do that kind of thing anymore.
Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all
‘Cept the girl from the Red River shore.
I’ve listened to this song now about fifty times since I purchased my copy of Tell Tale Signs and by the time this last verse rolls around, if I’m not already in tears, this manages to push me over the edge. How to bring back the dead; how to ever touch the reality of the vanished past or the ever-receding present; the absolute unknowability of each of us in this lonely world: these things have rarely been touched on more simply or more eloquently. Of the music that accompanies these poetic musings I can only say that it is equally simple and eloquent but even more impossible to do justice to in a prose summary.
And so my special plea: go to your neighborhood record store (if you can still find one…) or go to your computer and look for the song on iTunes. Whatever, just listen to it. I guarantee it’s one of those “songs you should hear before you die.”
