It’s rough out there, high water everywhere
Sometimes an album gathers an historical relation that does not fit it. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I got up at seven-thirty and walked to school, for the first day of my first full week in university. It was when my professor walked up to the front of the auditorium in tears that I learned what was going on in the world. It seemed so unbelievable. After class, I kind of numbly went through the motions of the day, and it being Tuesday, I went to the local music store, and picked up this album, which had been released that morning. The place was a ghost town. I got home and turned on CNN, and after a minutes, aghast, I hit mute. I hauled my stereo upstairs and put on this CD, listening to it at low volume on repeat, watching the news silently, for hours.
So that’s what I always think of when I hear Love & Theft, but it really doesn’t suit it. There is a nameless dread that gives an eerie weight to “High Water” but that’s dedicated to Charley Patton and anyone who’s heard Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues can see that it is merely a proper tribute to a legend, and can otherwise be attributed to that whole burgeoning millennial apocalypticism. What Love & Theft is like, more than anything, is a classic Creedence Clearwater Revival record. It is a retrogressive album recollecting the earliest days of rock and roll and the blues and folk that fueled them. Bob Dylan was by this point well past any interest in making political statements, and really he never was, he wrote protest songs because his influences and idols were protest singers, and because he began his career in very politically charged, socially dire times. These days he has nothing to prove and his only aim is to enjoy making music that pays tribute to all the music that inspired him in his youth, leave the strident politics to the young. This upsets a lot of people who have this warped view of Dylan as a strictly political entity when he’s always been more of a trickster. It even seems to distort people’s reality – I once had a conversation with someone who said they hated this album because on the cover art Dylan is in a white suit driving a Cadillac and I could not convince them that the cover looked nothing like that at all.
Anyway, if you keep in mind that this is Dylan in full playful trickster mode, practicing a more gentle form of his classic jokey surrealism, this is quite an enjoyable album. I’ve seen Dylan in concert twice since its release and he’s invigorated by the material, and plays his old legend-building songs in this style too. Yes, crime of crimes, Love & Theft is fun. There are jokes – in “Po’ Boy” Dylan sings ‘called room service, said send up a room’ and in “Bye and Bye” he breaks out the old chestnut ‘I was sitting on my watch so I could be on time.’ It’s a party. As such, with my initial experience of the album in mind, I feel conflicted about it. All this serious baggage for such a cheerily relaxed album, it’s a shame. For the longest time, “High Water” felt like the focal point of the album for me (helped by it being a really fantastic song), but it is a detour. “Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee” is light social satire, sure, just as the Baum characters were, dull-witted, inconsequential yes-men. Other than that, this is just a ride through history. As Dylan sings in “Summer Days” ‘She says you can’t repeat the past, I say you can’t? What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can.’ That isn’t to say none of the old savage fire is totally absent. “Bye and Bye” may be at times a silly love song, but he still breaks out lines like ‘I’m gonna baptize you in fire so you can sin no more’ and on the rambling “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” he says ‘If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again, you do so at the peril of your life. I’m not quite so cool or forgiving as I seem, I’ve seen enough heartache and strife.’ About as straight-up fun a Dylan album as there ever was, just some classic good times blues by a legend. ‘I’ve cried for you,’ Dylan sings near the end, ‘now it’s your turn, you can cry a while.’
****1/2
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