Dylan's own MODERN TIMES (CD review)

POP ALBUM REVIEW
Seduced by the master once again
Saucy, romantic ... Bob Dylan? He's all that on "Modern Times," with a
touch of the blues too.


By Ann Powers, Times Staff Writer


"Funny" and "sexy" are two words that don't often surface in the heap
of praise directed at Bob Dylan. He's always been as skilled a
wisecracker as a waxing poet, and who could doubt his penchant for
romance? After all, he wrote "Lay Lady Lay." To his own chagrin,
Dylan's spicy side has long been overshadowed by his talent for writing
generational anthems.

Now, in the autumn of his years, he's rightfully admired for creating a
body of work that's biblical in spirit and, virtually, size. But it's
good to remember that his joke book packs as much punch as his archive
of wisdom. And don't forget his little black book, either.


"Put some sugar in my bowl, I feel like laying down," Dylan, 65, sings
on the make-out ballad "Spirit on the Water," borrowing the line from
Nina Simone, who also knew that love, laughter and rage coexist on the
same color wheel. The song is based around a descending guitar line as
polished as a gigolo's smile. Its Hoagy Carmichael swing is only one
sound explored on the new album "Modern Times," which also encompasses
Chicago blues and - nothing else to call it - Dylanesque rock. But
the song's seductiveness turns up everywhere. Recorded with Dylan's
current touring band, which shows simpatico grace of an ensemble out to
prove nothing beyond the pleasure of each other's company, this
swinging, sometimes mournful, often tender set of 10 songs proves an
easy album to, well, love.

"Modern Times" fulfills the mandate of a late Dylan album: its 10 songs
make you think hard about the past and muse quietly about the future.
Titles like "Thunder on the Mountain" feature apocalypse aplenty, and
rejuvenating interpolations of source material from Muddy Waters, Carl
Perkins and the like further Dylan's efforts to expose the "strong
foundation," as he calls it, of his own work. But Dylan also gives a
randy tickle to the funny bone and the family jewels, reminding us all
that, in pop at least, profundities register better when stirred with
something sweet.

The sauciness of "Modern Times" is a necessary complement to its more
philosophical side. Though his personal eccentricities earn chuckles,
Dylan's work is never taken lightly, partly because of his own legacy
building. The process of Bob Beatification that's been going on since
1997 - the year he released his late-phase masterwork "Time Out of
Mind" and survived a serious wake-up call in the form of a heart
infection - has secured his status as Bard of Rock, whose music
encapsulates everything serious and noble about American music. He's
our living Rosetta stone, his songs carrying forth the essence of a
thousand blues and folk classics, connecting the canonical and the
folkloric to the present day.

Dylan has aided this process through several dramatic acts of
self-documentation, most recently his memoir "Chronicles" and the
Martin Scorsese-directed documentary "No Direction Home." He's been
analyzed by Oxford don Christopher Ricks, named an album ("Love and
Theft") after a study of blackface minstrels by University of Virginia
prof Eric Lott, and continues to be regularly nominated for the Nobel
Prize. Dylan's music supports these elevating moves: He's made three
great records since hitting the age of AARP membership, each more
explicitly grounded in arcane Americana, such as the borrowed Muddy
Waters titles and the lyrical references to Mark Twain and Edgar Allan
Poe. The case for Dylan as enduring Serious Artist has been secured by
his own footnotes.

Yet even as Dylan transformed himself into Shakespeare, something else
was happening. He was getting ... looser. Maybe it started with the
Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup that also featured a Beatle, George
Harrison, shaking loose of his heroic shackles. In that band's 1990
single, "She's My Baby," Dylan sang about his girl sticking her tongue
right down his throat. In the video, he's wearing a straw boater hat, a
foreshadowing of the straight-out-of-"Deadwood" costumes he currently
wears. He doesn't look as if he's making history. He looks as if he's
having fun.

Fun has been a major aspect of Dylan's resurgence, though it's not
often emphasized by the man himself or his iconographers. The lyric of
"Highlands," the standout epic ballad from "Time Out of Mind," turned
on a lengthy comedy routine involving a waitress and a hard-boiled egg.
(There was also a line about Dylan's neighbors complaining that he was
playing his Neil Young records too loud.) "Love and Theft," whose CD
packaging included a staged "band rehearsal" photograph worthy of some
folkie "Spinal Tap," started off with a musical sketch about two outlaw
clowns named Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and got more raucous from
there. Now, with the more musically subdued "Modern Times," Dylan takes
time to explore the nuances of romantic comedy, though his jokes
usually carry a sting and his romance, like so many, ends in tears.

Charlie Chaplin, whose last silent film likely inspired the title of
"Modern Times," invented a character similar to the one Dylan inhabits
here. A sad sack with hidden powers, Chaplin's Little Tramp gets his
girl only after many rounds of humiliation. Dylan exposes his own
romantic desires and weaknesses throughout the songs of "Modern Times,"
pinning a rose to his torn lapel and crooning in that hard-won,
threadbare voice:

I'm touched with desire

What don't I do?

Through flame and through fire

I'll build my world around you

The end times may be near, but that's no reason to stop spooning.

The image of an old man in full Casanova mode is one that makes many
people uncomfortable. Dylan foregrounds the ludicrousness of his
courting stance in "Thunder on the Mountain," the Chuck Berry-style
romp that begins the album, by expressing a certain fascination with
R&B singer Alicia Keys. Keys is not much older than Dylan's youngest
daughter, and that's reason enough to snicker - no wonder Dylan weeps
whenever he thinks of her, growling his admiration in a tone that only
shows off his vocal decrepitude. But she's a ringer here.

The woman Dylan pursues throughout the fire and flood of "Modern Times"
is someone who's been around much longer. She is the universal
temptress who dances through Dylan's dreamscape: Call her Bathsheba,
Salome or simply "sugar mama," as Dylan does. Innocent or a "lazy slut"
(as Dylan indecorously calls her in "Rollin' and Tumblin," one of the
album's Muddy Waters rewrites), momentarily captured or forever
elusive, she represents the futility of pursuing anything but
provisional happiness within a dying world. The one time Dylan does
name her on "Modern Times" reinforces her unattainability: It's in the
elegantly folkish "Nettie Moore," whose title he took from a mid-19th
century song about a love affair destroyed when the woman, a slave, is
sold.

Dylan's view of women is as traditional as his love of analog recording
and old-timey songs. This self-proclaimed family man, who felt so
little need to distinguish the identities of his ex-wives in his
autobiography that he merged them, does seem a bit miffed that young
women in particular exert so much pull over him. Yet even if the
furious longing he expresses throughout "Modern Times" has one root in
a pre-feminist's discontent with modern gender roles, it's also heavier
than that. The silly, wretched pounding of Dylan's heart, like the
ragged flower Chaplin's Tramp offers his tattered sweetheart, presents
romance as the strategy against life's devastating assaults. This
heroism, Dylan ruefully intimates, is bound to fail.

Such thoughts are as serious as the Louisiana flood Dylan spookily
anticipated with 2001's "High Water," a disaster he addresses with
bitter black humor here in "The Levee's Gonna Break." Like Chaplin
getting stuck in the cog of a giant factory wheel in "Modern Times,"
Dylan plays up the touching absurdity of dire situations. This links
him, as always, to the blues. Quoting the sources you'd expect -
Memphis Minnie for that levee song, Big Joe Williams via Merle Haggard
on "Workingman's Blues 2," three traditional songs in "Nettie Moore"
- he strikes the shifting balance of bawdiness and sexual dread that
typified the early blues, a music made by poor people, usually black
and often female, for whom asserting desire was an act of
near-revolution. In the songs Dylan admires and in many ways emulates,
images easily move from the earthy to the surreal to the comic,
remaining as unsettled as the feelings they express.

That's what happens in songs like "Thunder on the Mountain," in which
the sexual metaphor "I got the pork chops, she got the pie" finds its
way into scenes worthy of Revelations, or in the Patti Smith-style
jeremiad "Ain't Talkin," which inserts a homely image borrowed from a
bluegrass tune - "Eatin' hog-eyed grease in a hog-eyed town" - into
a landscape otherwise rife with visions of eternal light. It seems that
what Dylan wants us to remember about the traditional music he
champions isn't that it was deeper or more serious than the
well-engineered sounds that fill our ears now. It's that the old songs
don't make distinctions between serious and funny, love and religion,
the food of the body and the food of the soul. Like an old man and his
"Modern" music, the old songs are beyond all that.

copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times