Hellhound on the Loose

By Jay Cocks

The margin. Bob Dylan kept pushing it back, bending it around, like some rock-struck jet pilot always testing himself, testing his craft, punching the outside of the envelope. Dylan took rock 'n' roll way up high where the air is thin and the head gets giddy. Rock has never come back. Bob Dylan has never come down.

He is 44 now, and he has been wandering, rankling, challenging and extending the musical margin for more than two decades. Don't think twice, anyone: it is 22 years since Blowin' in the Wind appeared on his second album, and a flat 20 since Like a Rolling Stone was released and kicked rock songwriting onto its head. Incredible that there could have been such a radical change in his style in just two years, from the plainspoken beauty of Wind to the diabolical and delirious poetry of Stone. There was hardly a beat for transition, just an amphetamine rush of allusive imagery and electric boogie fused by will and some dark unknowable divining spirit. Bob Dylan not only lived on the margin, he was the margin. Approach at your peril. Precious few have ever got near him, and no one has gone beyond.

Biograph, a handily priced ($30) five-record retrospective of Dylan's career, is a heady reminder of his importance, the sort of overview usually given only to artists entering their eighth decade or ones who have met an untimely end. Dylan, however, released his 29th album, Empire Burlesque, in June, and, on that evidence, is still working at full power. So Columbia Records' release of Biograph puts him into a unique position: he is competing with himself, and is stacked up against his own past besides. No wonder he has professed mixed feelings about the Biograph project and took no part in the song selection.

But he has been doing a fair amount of promotion and sat down for a garrulous, disarming interview with Screen writer-Journalist Cameron Crowe that fills a 36-page booklet and spills over onto both sides of the five record sleeves. He also talked to TIME (see following story), and with Dylan, interviews can be as deft as his musical performances. Biograph contains 53 songs, some of them standards like Mr. Tambourine Man and Lay Lady Lay, others more recent material like Every Grain of Sand and a relatively obscure scorcher, Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar. The songs are arranged by contrast and casual association, not chronologically, and the ordering, even when playful (as in following Tangled Up in Blue with It's All Over Now, Baby Blue), gives even the most familiar tunes a fresh resonance. In many cases, too, the music is stronger, bolder than on the originals, since Compilers Bruce Dickinson, Don DeVito and Jeff Jones worked from the original tapes, which were then mastered digitally.

A fan of long standing or a listener coming to Dylan for the first time are both bound to be struck by the pertinence and spirit of even the oldest songs. Masters of War sounds just as apt in the Star Wars era as it did in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, and classic status has not eroded the surgical edge from the fun of Subterranean Homesick Blues: "Keep a clean nose/ Watch the plain clothes/ You don't need a weather man/ To know which way the wind blows." (Note to fanatics: even a record that sounds as good as Biograph cannot clear up all the mysteries of Dylan's enunciation and phrasing. To make sure you get things right, consult his Lyrics 1962-1985, a revised edition of most of the songwriter's best material just republished by Alfred A. Knopf.) In this context, the controversial and sometimes reviled religious rock that Dylan produced between the end of the '70s and the start of the '80s makes better sense and seems even more powerful. He started out sounding like a beat incarnation of the blues singer Blind Blake and ended sounding like a juke-joint William Blake, singing of spirits, angels, doom and deliverance.

The real gold on Biograph, however, is 18 unreleased tracks, either alternate versions of material already commercially available or, in a few cases, songs never released. The goofy, carnal joy of Baby, I'm in the Mood for You matches up against the high-torque mystery of I'll Keep It with Mine, the scruffy spirit of a demo version of Forever Young, the lovelorn braggadocio of Up to Me. One new song, Caribbean Wind, written in 1981, is a hallmark melting of comic nightmare and freaky apocalypse. From its spooky invocations ("Sea breeze blowin', there's a hellhound loose") to its lingering chorus ("And them Caribbean winds still blow from Nassau to Mexico/ . . . And them distant ships of liberty on them iron waves so bold and free,/ Bringing everything that's near to me nearer to the fire"), it is, by itself and on its own, good enough to establish whoever wrote it as a seminal force in rock. In this case, the man who actually did write it, then recorded it, ended up leaving it off Shot of Love, the album for which it was originally intended. Who else but Bob Dylan could have shrugged off a song like that?

There are, even with the release of Biograph, something like a hundred Dylan songs still in the vaults; the lyrics for a few indeed appear in the Knopf collection. It seems as if the mother lode has barely been tapped. Dylan's most recent music stands on its own without the support of the vintage material, but an occasional look into the past can correct the historical balance. Dylan remembers Joe Strummer of the Clash telling him that by the time he first "heard my records, I'd already been there and gone." Biograph is like a time tunnel, then, a place for reflection and regeneration, and a chance, once again, to ask some familiar questions. Like "What's he going to do now?" And "Should we play just one more time again?" And "What's that mean?" And--of course--"How does it feel/ To be without a home/ Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone?" Answers may not be immediately available. But now you know--again--where to start looking. --By Jay Cocks