Talkin' Street-Legal (+Ex)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This show is a part of the. [00:00:01] Speaker B: FM podcast network, the home of great music podcasts. Visit [email protected] you are listening to the Dilentans podcast. Hey everyone, I'm Jim Salvucci of the Dilentaunts, and welcome to the latest installment of million dollar bash. Bob Dylan's 15th, 16th and 17th studio albums, Planet Waves, blood on the tracks, and desire, had been solid successes when he released street Legal in 1978. The album was not universally well received by critics, although it was a commercial success. I remember being told in the early eighties that the album was a disaster and that I should just avoid it altogether if I wanted to retain any respect for Dylan. Unfortunately, I heeded that advice until after the album was remixed in 1999. My immediate reaction upon listening to it then was to try to recall who gave me that atrocious advice way back when I wanted vengeance. That person denied me 20 years of listening to street legal, although I suppose I bear Smidgen of responsibility. The band was mostly drawn from the large ensemble performing during Dylan's japanese and australian tours. The and notably included a chorus consisting of Dylan's future wife Carolyn Dennis, veteran singer Joanne Harris, and Helena Spriggs, who was all of 17 at the time. He would continue to record and tour with the chorus through much of the eighties. The recording sessions were reportedly sloppy, being held in Dylan's rehearsal space called Rundown Studios using mobile equipment on a truck. The resulting sonics from the original mix were less than stellar, which may be why the album had a rough reputation. The saxophone bits sound somewhat dated now, but they still work. Street Legal is a transitional album in many ways, standing between the mid seventies classics and the gospel years to come. The song lyrics depict a troubled soul. The album opens with the percussion driven, tarot inflected changing of the guards and culminates with where are you tonight? Journey through dark Heat, which references a battle against the enemy within. With such numbers as the surreal and apocalyptic seigneur tales of yankee power, the hard rocking blues of the allegorical and arguably misogynistic screed newpony, and the pathos inducing plaint is your love in vain, we experience a Dylan who is searching for some meaning in his life. Perhaps it is not, then surprising that Dylan's christian conversion happened sometime around the recording of the album. The album's current reputation is wide ranging. While it remains a controversial low point for some, others advocate for a street legal installment of the bootleg series. I personally find the album magisterial and frustrating and brilliant and heartbreaking and baffling and inspiring one of my faves. Today we are joined by three of our regular bashers. Unfortunately, Nita, Goss, and Kurkarni were not able to join us this month, but we will get this powerhouse roundtable back together for sure. Don't you worry. So let's introduce today's panel. First up, we've got Greeley Hearn. Hey, Greeley. [00:03:22] Speaker C: Hello. Hello to you all. Glad to be here again. [00:03:26] Speaker B: Next up, Rockin Rob Virginio. [00:03:29] Speaker D: Hey, everyone. Glad to be here. Jim, thanks very much for having us. [00:03:33] Speaker B: And we round out our mini panel with Aaron Callahan, who will be launching her own podcast soon. Infinity goes up on trial. Hey, Aaron. [00:03:42] Speaker A: Hey. How is everyone today? Very solemn good Friday to you all. [00:03:47] Speaker B: Well, it won't be good Friday to anyone listening to this, but it is for us today. Yeah, it is for us today. [00:03:53] Speaker A: I'm glad to be here. [00:03:55] Speaker B: And, Aaron, do you want to tell us a little bit about your new podcast? [00:03:59] Speaker A: Sure. So Infinity goes up on trial, will launch on my own sub stack by the same name. Infinity goes up on trial and through the FM podcast network. And my focus is looking at people who are both in the Dylan world, but also Dylan adjacent to look at how the ideas in Dylan's work really are universal, and we're looking at them through a deeper kind of political, social, cultural, and artistic context. And my first guest is a theater director and playwright, Jason Nodler, who explores how the feeling in Dylan's work influences art and his life. My second guest will be a theologian, so stay tuned for May 1. Every month we'll drop an episode, and hopefully I'll see all of you good folks on it, too. [00:04:43] Speaker B: All right, I hope your theologian solves our age old dilemma as to whether Christmas in the heart is one of the christian albums. [00:04:50] Speaker A: Maybe I can ask him. He has one of our Dylan adjacents, though, so he may not have a suitable answer for that. [00:04:58] Speaker B: All right, looking forward to that, and congratulations. [00:05:01] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:05:03] Speaker B: So to get us started, I'm going to launch us into this by offering a little tidbit that court left with me. He said, I think a key part of street legal is the narrative of rediscovery. It would be interesting to talk about how it was originally received and how or why it became resuscitated in the early aughts. It became a symbol of generational shifts, I think so. In other words, what he's talking about here is the reception of street legal both by fans and by critics. And I gave you a little of that in my introduction. So if we could start talking with that, we can go from there. [00:05:37] Speaker A: I think Courtney and I have had. I'll just start, and then we can riff off each other. But I think Courtney and I have had a lot of discussions about how we come to Dylan. And again, if you are one of the original fans and you're going through it chronologically, maybe street legal is a disappointment. But if you are coming into it at any entry point, you're looking at some of the themes in street legal of transition, like trying to find yourself. And so I think maybe that's why, because we see Dylan struggling in this album, and not really, maybe artistically, but more so personally, because 1977, his divorce is final, and this is recorded right after he gets back from the Japan Australia tour very quickly, as you said, very messily. And so I think even the COVID image to me, represents Dylan descending from something, and he's still looking. He's come down from something, and so there's a dissent, and he's searching for whether it's a guide or direction or something. And I think a lot of folks, particularly in the aughts, if we're looking at America, all the turmoil that's going on, maybe people were looking for they were in that same period of searching. So perhaps that is why there's a rediscovery of it. I'm open to being wrong about that, but that's what I think. [00:06:50] Speaker B: I have to say that the album cover and the album title are two of the strangest combination. It's street legal. If you look up the definition of street legal, it is not a remarkable thing. It is dullness itself, and the picture itself is just very strange with him looking up the street. But it is. And I wonder if that even put people off. But could be. But I like that idea of the aughts being a time of searching as well. Rob, you want to say something? [00:07:17] Speaker D: I was just going to say that one of the things that struck, it's like your experience with the album. It's not an album that I turn back to often. So I was really happy to be able to turn back to it and think about it in this way and the changing of the guards and Signor, for example, especially Signor Aaron's talking about the resonances. I think it's a really brilliant argument about the reception of the album in the early aughts, where we Americans searching, and therefore the narrator that is seen through the. Throughout these songs, searching, sometimes in an agonized way, resonates. And I found a lot of these songs resonating, certainly with Dylan's own biography, which I'll talk about more later. But Alt Signor, I guess I'm picking that one up, is definitely thinking it's got political resonances in it. [00:08:10] Speaker C: Right. [00:08:10] Speaker D: You had the 73 coup by Pinochet, and I can talk a little bit later about the opening verse of that. And so it goes beyond a lot of. I don't really know the kind of reception of it, and I can't articulate that as well as Aaron could. But certainly the way in which it's written about it's definitely the shadow of his conversion lies heavily over this album. And so it was really great to get that shadow of the conversion out. And a lot of the writing does see it as this transitional album where its greatness and magnificence and frustrations, to borrow Jim's language, come from the fact that we're reading it as, oh, it's in a determinant way that it's leading him to evangelical Christianity. That's where this album is going to sift itself out. But I don't know. But taking it on its own, it's a really interesting album in that he could be going. He could have gone in many different directions. He didn't necessarily have to convert to evangelical Christianity. I think without the christian conversion trilogy of albums that follow it. If we look at it just on its own, it's a really interesting album in that regard. [00:09:34] Speaker A: I think so, too. To answer you, Rob, I did a little bit of research on how often he's played these songs live, and only two of them have been played outside of the 78 tour and senior tales of Yankee Powers, and played 265 times, which is a lot. He hasn't played it in 13 years. But clearly that song in particular is one that he returns to. And I think because there is that theme, maybe it's. I don't know if it's overtly political, but there's something there that he keeps going back to, to play live that he really likes. Like my argument with Silvio, he's played it so much because he likes to play it. But I think there's something maybe a little bit deeper in this song, because there is that person who is in Mexico. There's that sense of border and sort of to bring up Anzaljua's borderlands. Like he's in a sort of metaphase and he's searching for someone to guide him. And you're right, if we take it on its own, it doesn't necessarily presage the gospel period. But it could be any searching or searching for any guide. And so I think there's something there that it does translate outside of just that moment in time in Dalton's career. [00:10:42] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:10:42] Speaker D: And it's interesting that the opening verse, do you know where we're headed? Licking county road or Armageddon. It reminds me so much of the opening verse of Blind Willie Mactel. [00:10:51] Speaker C: Right. [00:10:52] Speaker D: There's an era on the doorpost, right, to New Orleans, to Jerusalem. So it's remarkably similar in that regard. And of course, blind willing tell is something that he recovers during the never ending tour and plays many times. So it's interesting that he's going back to those songs. [00:11:10] Speaker B: I'd love to hear from Braylee here. Do you have anything to say about the reception of the album? [00:11:15] Speaker C: I hope you're able to hear me. I apparently am getting bad connection here. It kicked me out of Zoom for a minute. And so hopefully I don't come in and out for you. [00:11:26] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:11:26] Speaker C: I think the evangelical association of this album is indispensable with my experience of it. I was not around as a Dylan fan in 1978. I was alive, but I wasn't listening to Bob Dylan yet. And so, in retrospect, coming myself, to be honest about it, from a fairly fundamentalist, Bible thumping background in the hills of Tennessee, a part of Dylan's career that for years I just bracketed as not interested was the evangelical stuff. Right. That was not what I came to Dylan for. And I just didn't immerse myself in it. In retrospect, I think, foolishly, I think said some of his greatest performances, but the material just was not attractive to me. And I think that caught up in the wake of that. And so in the early two thousands, and especially with the release of the trouble no more Bootleg series, I really started appreciating that whole body of work and that period of Dylan's work more. And now I did find lyrically in a sounding album, street Legal. But I think my first entryway back into it was the sound. There's this big sound. It's not a sound that I had heard from Dylan since I had not listened to the evangelical stuff. Sounds really cool. People and people complain about the sound being the strike against it, right? The sonics of it. My ears are not sophisticated enough to hear what it is I'm supposed to hate about this album sonically. And I don't hear that. Instead, I just think, wow, it's cool to hear so many different vocalists and a saxophone and these sounds that Dylan is experimenting with at that time. Now, to me, just sounds really cool. [00:13:22] Speaker D: I love Billy Cross's electric guitar, his lead guitar on new pony, and we better talk this over. It's really great stuff, really spectacular. I agree with you in that regard. [00:13:37] Speaker B: So let's talk a little bit more about the sound. And I wish I could say that, Greeley, that you had a tight connection to our zoom, but you keep fading in and out there. But you got your message across, I think, enough. But let's talk a little bit about that big sound, the guitars, the bongos, the saxophone. This is pretty unique in terms of an ensemble for Dylan. I know he was touring with a similar band, but we don't really hear this much in his studio releases. What do you make of that? [00:14:05] Speaker D: Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of the initial reaction to street legal sound was here he is trying to catch up to Springsteen. Here he is trying to grab some of that full blooded, massive, all Pistons running rock and roll album. But I don't know if that explanation works for me because he's always sonically exploring. He's always exploring sonically. He's always throwing new instrumentation in there. And something like Desire and the Rolling Thunder review tour certainly doesn't have the full panoply of different instruments, like you mentioned, the bongos and the saxophone and so on and so forth. But desire is an explosive of different sounds and different ways of singing, as much as this album is, I think so I don't find it uniquely, like, standing out. Certainly he doesn't deploy or use saxophones and in the studio in other albums, but the saxophones are like Scarlett Rivera's violin in desire. He's exploring sonically. So it doesn't really, for me, it's not, oh, this is this kind of. He's trying to do a Springsteen. He's trying to make himself relevant in some way. I don't think that's true. [00:15:25] Speaker A: I agree with you, Rob, because I don't see Dylan saying, oh, that guy's doing that. I'm going to do it to be relevant. And so it's the same kind of sound that he has in Budokan. And so I just think this is what he's trying at this point because he has the bongos and the saxophone and all of those things. And I think it may be lazy to say, oh, there's a saxophone that Dylan's using now. So he's trying to sound like Springsteen. Cause Springsteen has Clarence Clemens. But I do find it interesting that this is the first album where he doesn't say harmonica. And I wonder, did you guys miss the harmonica? This is the first time we don't hear him playing it. And Greeley shaking his head no, because you've talked previously, Greeley, about how you like the harmonica almost as Dylan's second voice. That was one of my questions. So I was like, oh, he doesn't play harmonica on this. And I wonder what you guys think of that, because he is. There's. That's a definite shift for thinking about this new music and how it's sonically different. The absence of what's notably part of his voice is missing from this. [00:16:25] Speaker C: That's funny. Cause I had. I love Springsteen and had never thought of it as Dylan doing his Springsteen, though now I really wanna think about that some more because this would be the same year as the river. And Clarence Clemens, a very notable sax player, as part of that rock outset. I guess at the time, I was not around at the time, but it was compared much more to Dylan going Vegas, like doing the Elvis impersonation. And he even had on that tour Elvis bass player since Elvis had died the year before, or Dylan going Neil diamond. And I can see that as well, especially since Robbie Robertson was producing some of Neil Diamond's work around this same time. Yeah, I can see those comparisons. I could see those comparisons more at the time. In retrospect, though, like you're saying, it's hard for me to believe that Dylan is simply being derivative. And he never seems to make his. To the extent that he makes career calculations at all, it seems to never be what will make me most popular, what will sell the most albums and tickets. If anything, he seems to be doing the opposite of that calculated move. [00:17:41] Speaker B: One thing that's true with Dylan is that most of his music, particularly up to this point, have been sonically either leading edge or completely off the rails, right? Everybody else is going psychedelic and he releases John Wesley Harding in Nashville Skyline or the wild Mercury sound of Blonde on Blonde. Very cutting edge. And you can even see that with desire, not what everybody else is doing. Other people follow it. In some ways, one could argue that this album, street legal and even subsequent albums were more trailing edge, or at least in with the pack for some time. And that might even explain some of the bad press that the eighties get all together. You certainly see that with some of the production values, like tight connection that was on my Brain Empire burlesque very much has an eighties production sound to it. This album sounds very late seventies, unlike any other Dylan album with the saxophones and whatnot. Those are tropes of the musical tropes of the late seventies. What other thoughts you have about the sound, though? You think it, aside from just the reception, what's your opinion about the sound? I mean, do you like it? [00:19:08] Speaker C: Sometimes. Sometimes I do. This is. I think it was Rob that said earlier, this is not an album I have listened to a lot over the years. There are the big three, which I think changing of the guards, signor, and where are you tonight? Those are huge, massive, major Bob Dylan works. I would put where are you tonight? As if I were to do. I'm not into rankings, but it would be in my top ten Bob Dylan songs of all time. I just think it's an amazing song. The others I find more interesting, but by Dylan standards, more forgettable. And partially it's the sound, maybe partially it's lyrics, but they're minor works to me musically and lyrically compared to the. [00:19:56] Speaker A: Big three, but even that greatly, it's a third of his album, which are masterpieces. And even the minor works are better than what most folks do. And I'm gonna. I agree with you about those three. And I have a special place in my heart for is your love in vain? No, it's not a great song, but I do love that song. And I like the live version at Buddha Khan, where he previewed. I don't know. I'm with Greeley sometimes, and I think with Dylan, it's like. It depends on my mood or what I'm interested in listening to. But a street legal one that I'm like, oh, I have to listen to it. When we were talking about love and theft. I love and theft. And I'll go back to that Austin. Or there are some albums that you just play. This isn't one that I just. I'm like, I have to listen to street legal. Maybe three to four songs from it. Yes, they'll be in a rotation. But no, not. I'm just like, yes, I'm in a street legal mood. Let's put it on and jam. [00:20:46] Speaker C: No, I agree with Aaron. [00:20:49] Speaker D: Yeah, that's my take on it as well. Although listening to it over the past week or so, where are you tonight? That's a killer. That's where all. Every kind of the writing, right, where he's mixing these quasi allegorical just symbols and personages and images just flowing really quickly past you and you're trying to grasp them. And then the vocals of that song are just so utterly committed. And when he sings I can't believe I'm alive. I believe that he can't believe he's alive. He's really. It's amazing. So that one really blowed me up. I was blown over by that song, listening to it again, how every kind of, like sonic and lyric innovation or whatever that he's doing on this album kind of coalesced in that song in such a powerful way. So I don't know if I'm going to upgrade it to that song and put it in one of my Dylan Spotify playlists, but it might make it. [00:21:48] Speaker C: It might make it. [00:21:51] Speaker B: I'm still an album listener, so I don't do playlists. Pretty committed to the album as an art form. But yeah, actually I used to pull this album out quite a bit. Not so much these days, but changing the guard probably got me some. Through some really rough times in the job when I had a horrible boss and I blast that on my way to work and sing at the top of my lungs, especially that one verse gentleman, he said, which has got to be one of the best, just anthemic verses that Dylan's ever come up with. It's amazing. So let's talk a little bit about the lyrics. I gestured toward the theme of searching, and we've talked about that a little bit. But what else is going on in the lyrics in this album? Is there a cohesive lyrical style here? Is there something going on or thematically? [00:22:43] Speaker C: I just love how enigmatic the lyrics are, and not in a bad way. There are bad, enigmatic Dylan songs that just seem obscure and impenetrable. And then there are times when it's the good kind of enigmatic that there seems to be something poetically resonant, even if I couldn't definitively dissect the meaning of it. I just love so many, it's hard to pick out just a few. But that verse from senor, the last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled was that train load of fools bogged down in a magnetic field a gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring said, son, this ain't a dream no more it's the real thing. Yeah, I love that. I have no idea what that means, any of it, but what vivid imagery that is. And Dylan pulls out a lot of those of two profound and too pure obscurities in this album that just. I can't get enough of it. I love the songwriting of this album. [00:23:50] Speaker A: I do love what he says about Signor in the Mardenaus to biographs. The song is the aftermath of when two people who were leaning on each other because neither of them had the guts to stand up on their own, all of a sudden they break apart. He said, I think that's how I felt when I wrote that. [00:24:05] Speaker C: And just. [00:24:05] Speaker A: It cuts you. Like, when that line, he's, no, this is for real now. You have to stand on your own. And that's. I don't always love to read his biography into it. And, Rob, you spoke a little bit to his biographies. Maybe you'll talk about that now. But it's hard not to separate those two. And I think I identify, because my parents split up in 77. By 78, I was going to Disney World with my dad by myself. And so I'm like, I'm in it with him, I think when I listen to this, and maybe that's why I don't listen to it that often, because there's something there in my own biography. But, yeah, I think when he says the people who are leaning on each other as maybe of domestic habit and routine, and they break apart, he's feeling that now. And also, how fun that this is the album where his new wife. He's broken up with his ex wife and his new wife now as a backup singer. I just thought that was interesting. But I'm interested to hear what Rob has to say about biography and the lyrics or the album, because you mentioned that before. [00:24:58] Speaker D: Yeah, I turn back like I often do. I often. Because it's such a great work. Michael Gray. And his argument is that. And I disagree in a way. Like I said, I like to look at this album on its own and not have the shadow of the conversion over it. Right. To assess it on its own merits. And he reads it as this allegory of Dylan's spiritual struggle, which, of course, the spiritual struggle is there for sure, but it wasn't guaranteed that he was going to convert and write these gospel albums. In any case, he goes so far in his book, I think, to actually identify some of the women figures in these songs as Sarah. And he says, I'm justified in doing this because he did it on desire. He already wrote an autobiographical song, Sarah. And this is tending towards this other important biographical moment for Dylan, his conversion. But it's interesting. The opening of changing of the guards teases an allegorical reading. 16 years. And so you're thinking 62 to 78. Okay, he's talking about his career. So you go from 16 years that could be seen as this biographical survey of his career up until that point. And then we go into 16 banners united over the field where the good shepherd grieves and we're in a completely different allegorical space. He, like, teases this, I'm going to be autobiographical here. And then it's nope. And it's like something out of a Bruegel painting or I don't know what this. Like 16 banners united over. I picture a crowded Bruegel painting with banners and the good shepherd grieving off in the corner. Desperate men, desperate women, divided, spreading their wings beneath the falling leaves. It's a completely different. And I really like the way that Dylan, and I agree with Greeley as well, writes in this album lyrically, where he teases the allegorical, but refuses to. To really give a straight up. There's no way that you can, in a facile way, connect these allegorical elements and it tells one complete story. [00:27:06] Speaker C: It's no. [00:27:06] Speaker D: The complete stories are in the verses themselves, and the verses themselves remain profoundly. A lot of them do enigmatic in a good way. [00:27:16] Speaker A: I think that challenge works, too, for is your love in vain? And I'm going to make my little argument for this song he takes for Robert Johnson's love in vain. But the difference is Johnson is following someone where Dylan is searching for someone. So it can't be Sarah, because Sarah is now in the past and he's searching for. Maybe it's Carolyn Dennis, who knows? But if it's biographical and he doesn't know, it's Carolyn Dennis. But the narrator of that song is not looking backward but looking forward. And so there's that aspect of it that he's looking for someone to be his partner, where he's just lost a partner. So I think I would contest Michael Gray in that way as well, that it's not Sarah. [00:27:59] Speaker B: I would throw Helena Spriggs into the mix, too. He and Helena Spriggs were obviously very close. They co wrote some songs together. Apparently there aren't a lot of outtakes, so I don't know if we will get a bootleg series version of this album. There wasn't a whole lot put on tape, but apparently a few songs were put on tape and they were written by her or co written by her. I don't know who performs them. I don't know if she performs or if he performs them, but so she would definitely be in that mix, even though she was quite young. [00:28:30] Speaker C: You're reminding me, or some of these comments are reminding me of one of my favorite Bob Dylan quotes in an interview around this period. This is from the Jonathan Cott 1978 Rolling Stone interview. You may know which one I'm going to quote here. It's about the composition of changing of the guards. Dylan said changing of the guards is a thousand years old. Woody Guthrie said he just picked songs out of the air. That means that they were already there and that he was tuned into them. Changing of the guards might be a song that might have been there for thousands of years, sailing around in the mist and one day I just tuned into it. I love that because it's so mystical and it's so Dylan. Right. But it also explained that sense that this feels like its taking place in ancient times. And maybe hes borrowing imagery from Tarot. I dont know Tarot well enough to recognize it all, but it feels like were in some kind of medieval setting. And yet theres something very interesting going on with time, I think, or timelessness or the spatialization of time in this album too. Because lets not forget that Dylan. We so often associate Dylan's painting experiences and the lessons he learned about songwriting, again from Norman Ray and talk about the ways that might have been applied to blood on the tracks. And that's certainly valid. But I think it applies to street legal too. And in fact, I came across another intriguing quote from Dylan on that point. This is something he said to Matt Damsker. I'm quoting Dylan here. Never until I got to blood on the tracks did I finally get a hold of what I needed to get a hold of. And once I got hold of it, blood on the tracks wasn't it either. And neither was desire. Street legal comes the closest to where my music is going for the rest of time. It has to do with an illusion of time. What the songs are necessarily about is the illusion of time. It was an old man who knew about that, and I picked up what I could. The old man there presumably not referring to Signor, though it could be. And now I wonder if Signor is Norman Rabin. No, too biographical, but referring to Norman Rabin. But that sense of illusion of time. I'll give you just one example that struck me this time, and I never noticed this before, but if you. I think you really have to strain to make this an autobiographical album, even though Robert Shelton and Michael Gray do as good a job as you can probably, in making that argument. But just little details like the hero has yellow hair, has blonde hair, and there are a couple of references to that. And so you've got the reference in changing of the guards to he's pulling her down and she's clutching onto his long golden locks. And I had never noticed the connection there. That's the first song on the album with the last song on the album. And now we're in a very contemporary setting in a strip joint. There's a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage and a long time golden haired stripper on stage, and she winds back the clock and she turns back the page of a book that no one can write, oh, where are you tonight? And I'm suddenly realizing there's a kind of full circle moment here. [00:31:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:31:56] Speaker C: We're taking some of that imagery we had in the very first song that seemed to be so ancient, and now we're giving a very contemporary setting, and he's taking these kinds of archetypal pieces or these colors or these images, and he's rearranging them in time and space, but in ways that make the songs on this album feel interconnected. Even if I can't turn that into a coherent narrative, I just think there's a coherence on the imagistic level, even if not necessarily the narrative or philosophical level. [00:32:30] Speaker A: It's interesting, really, because to go with that visual aspect of changing of the guard. It was originally a poem that he published in 1976 under R. Zimmerman in the first issue of Photography magazine. And so he'd been thinking, or bits of it were, and he borrowed bits of it then to write changing of the guard. So it's possible he did think of it visually first in that very Norman Rabin esque way that then it becomes changing up the bar. But I didn't notice that the. The golden hair. Well done, you, Graylee. That's amazing. [00:33:05] Speaker D: I do feel very much. I agree with you, Greely, too, about the way that he's, like, taking these archetypal figures and in a painterly way, moving around, moving them around, playing with them in different configurations. And he's certainly searching, in a way, for some sort of direction. So one could make the argument that a lot of these songs, even though it's not, as you said, narratively unified, it's certainly imagistically unified. And he's rearranging all of these images again and again. [00:33:40] Speaker C: And maybe that's a tarot thing, too, right? Again, I don't know that world. But the idea that you've got one deck of cards and yet somehow this one deck of cards, depending on you, reshuffle them. And the different order in which these images appear make all the difference, right? Because it shapes one destiny versus another destiny. [00:34:00] Speaker B: And maybe that is the way the album moves from image to image in that same way. Right. Either as paintings or as cards. Because a lot of the imagery is static. It's not movement. There are exceptions, but a lot of it is just static imagery. I did this happen. It's not narrative in any sense. And sometimes it's hard to put together, like looking at a series of paintings, and you have to fill in the gaps between what happens between each. [00:34:28] Speaker D: Yeah. Verse six of waiting for the guards. The palace of mirrors, where the dog soldiers. I think a signor there with dog soldiers are reflected. The endless road and the wailing of chimes. The empty rooms where her memory is protected, where the angels voices whisper to the souls of previous times. There's so many different spaces that are evoked there. And the parataxis, the way that there's no one clause that's organizing all of them, it's. You swim in those images, in those different places, and it's quite compelling. [00:35:02] Speaker C: I was going to say it's juxtaposition, but it's also layering, which is a very painterly thing as well. The kind of layered paint upon paint, image upon image. Like one of my favorite. I don't know why. It's just a little thing, but I love that image. And changing of the guards with the stitches still mending, meet the heart shaped tattoo. That idea that there is a scar, a wound here that's fresh enough that it's not healed yet, and yet it's being disguised by. Covered over by a heart shaped tattoo. I just. I love that he doesn't explain what that means. I don't think he explains where the scar comes from or why it's being hidden or why it's a heart shaped tattoo, and yet it just feels like there's a whole lot to be unpacked out of that condensed little visual image, that layered visual. Yeah. [00:35:54] Speaker B: That is an incredible image. And it's funny, whenever I picture that in my head, I don't picture the stylized heart that would normally be tattooed. I picture an actual tattoo of an anatomically correct heart for some reason. Maybe it's the stitches, but I want to go back to what Rob said in terms of parataxis. And just for the uninitiated, parataxus is simple terms, a listing of things without usually any conjunctions involved. And when Rob read that. I never put this together before, but even though the images don't quite fit, the sound of reading that verse made me think of Wallace Stevens, who was a master of paratoxis. [00:36:36] Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really great. Jim. Yeah. And again, it strikes me so much that he's playing against. Cause the palace of mirrors. Then he's gotta wait for the chorus to sing it. And then it's such a dylan as able to phrase these incredibly complex verses in these really compelling ways. That's when people say, are defending his ability to sing. And they say it's the phrasing, the way that this is a masterclass, this album, in different ways of phrasing, these complex verses. And I've got to go. I feel terrible, Jim. I've got my committee meeting that I have to prep for. Thank you, everyone. This has been great, as always. [00:37:25] Speaker C: Really great. [00:37:26] Speaker A: Hi, Rob. It's good to see you. [00:37:27] Speaker C: Hi, Rob. Can I say one more thing? I don't know if this counts as parataxis, but I think it's next door to parataxis. If not, ooh, that sounds like Paris, Texas. Now, I'm totally on the different wavelength, but in terms of listing one of the songs, I can't even tell you if I like this song or not. I go back and forth, but it's different. It's a distinct song, no time to think. And one of about the distinct things in no time to think is that periodically Dylan will give us a list. Right? Memory, ecstasy, tyranny, hypocrisy. Or what's paradise, sacrifice, mortality, reality. And I don't know if that's really deep and profound. And there are certain wise interconnections between the things he puts in these lists. Or if he just likes the sound of them. He likes the sound of putting those words together. And I leaned toward the ladder that he just likes the sound of the way those words bounce off of each other. So that, in a weird way, the song, it reminds me I found myself thinking of most when listening to. Re listening to that song this time was all I really want to do. Where I feel like again, he's just putting words together that kind of rhyme and sound interesting together. I ain't looking to compete with you, beat or cheat or mistreat you, simplify you, classify you, deny, defy or crucify you. I don't think that's why so much as he just likes the kind of jingle jangle of those sounds together. So that it's more a sonic thing than a lyrical thing. [00:39:07] Speaker B: You made me just think of the footage of him in London, outside the pet shop, rearranging the words on the sign so they get more and more absurd. And as he's doing it, he's bouncing around very excitedly enjoying the rhythms and enjoying the absurdity of it all. So I think you're onto something there. Yeah, absolutely. [00:39:29] Speaker A: But I do hear a paper, Greylee, maybe world of Dylan paper and the whole tarot aspect of street legal and how he gives us these static images and it's for us to make the connections as if you're reading the tarot cards. To see what? Because he is searching. He's searching for some sense of a guide or direction. And that's what you do when you go to a tarot reading. It's like, what's my future going to be? And so if you put those things together, there are probably myriad ways you can read them. But I found that to be really interesting. It's given me something to think about. [00:40:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I like that. And of course, even though I keep putting in these disclaimers, I know nothing about tarot. So pay no attention to these theories of mine. But that's the nature of research, right? So it's not an excuse to say, I don't know what this means because I know nothing about tarot. That means, we'll do your homework, idiot. Go back and research. [00:40:23] Speaker A: There is a deck of Bob Dylan tarot cards, so you can even pull that in, too. I saw a presentation on tarot and I asked, is there a Bob Dylan set? The person who's an expert on it said, yes, there are Bob Dylan tarot cards. I need those. So you're onto something, Graylee. I champion you writing that. [00:40:44] Speaker B: I could just imagine listeners everywhere now googling the Bob Dylan tarot cards. [00:40:51] Speaker C: You're going to get the weirdest comments on this episode from the Tarot people. Yeah, that's right. That's right. [00:40:58] Speaker B: So, yeah, I love what we're saying here. And it also. And actually, I'm really sorry Nina's not here because she wrote a wonderful paper for the 19 conference in Tulsa. World of Bob Dylan on partially on street legal. And the tarot aspect of it. The other thing is that just even the title changing of the guards as the lead song, the changing, the changing of the guards, this is an album that is just. It's about flux. It's about transition. Maybe that's one of the reasons people struggle with it. People don't like transitions. They like solidity. They like it to land somewhere. But Dylan never is very good at that. [00:41:37] Speaker D: He's always fluid. [00:41:39] Speaker B: But what about just that theme of change throughout the album? Do you think that's there? Or is it pretty much limited to the title of changing of the guards? [00:41:50] Speaker A: I think for me, and I was thinking about this because change is so constant. Times are changing. Things have changed. It's just. It's constant in his career, is that things are going to shift and change. And then I was thinking of the quote from no direction homework. He says, an artist has to be. It can never be at a place where they've arrived somewhere. They have to be constantly, to paraphrase, in the state of evolution. And so that's the one thing that we can rely on, is that he's constantly going to push his own boundaries and he is constantly going to change the script for us. And we just have to go along on that ride with him. And again, I go back to this a lot, that people bring their expectations of who their Dylan is. Whatever the entry point for them was to Dylan, that's who Dylan is to them. And they can't get out of their own way to see the larger picture of the art that he's creating. And so if people are uncomfortable with this album, I would invite them to sit in that discomfort and figure out what is it that's making them uncomfortable. Why don't they like it and really think about what he's trying to do that's different from their expectation of him because he is working through some artistic, personal, maybe professional issues, that it works. Like at least three, at least a third of it works. Maybe four out of the five songs. If you're with me on is your love and vain. But there's something special happening that then brings him forward to where he's now in the arc of his career. This is a piece of that development. And we can't just. I don't think we can discount any of it or disregard any of the process. We have to go with him and try to understand it. [00:43:28] Speaker C: I need it to be three. I need it to be three, Aaron, because all of my Dylan theories involve the trilogy, right? So I need it to be. And I'll tell you, actually, that. Your question about change, what I reminded of in this Dylan album and in other great Dylan albums, I love, like Blonde on Blonde and Rough and Rowdy ways, is heroic quest, mythic quest, right? Which Joseph Campbell defined in three major phases. Separation, initiation and return, right? And so youve got separation, the leaving of the hero, the departure of the hero under a dire circumstances, the crisis in his personal life with the breakup of his marriage and family. But an artistic quest as well, right? And these weird, different encounters and battles and tests, which always end up being a test against one's own inner demons I thought I fought with my twin, the persecutor within, as he puts it so memorably in the final song, where are you tonight? Journey through dark heat. And that journey through dark heat invites us to read this as yet another descent into the underworld myth for Dylan, which is a big part, I think, of the blonde on blonde as well, and I think comes back in rough and rowdy ways. And shadow kingdom, but those are discussions for a different day. And return. You return to where you started, but it's not the same place, and you're not the same you. And so all is transformed, and this kind of myth of eternal. You start over, and yet it's a new beginning because it's a new you at that finish point. So, yeah, this. The more we're talking about street legal, the more it's rising, in my estimation, because I'm realizing how it fundamentally grapples with so many of those quintessential Dylan dilemmas that I love in his best work. [00:45:27] Speaker A: That works too greatly with the image that you pulled out of the golden hair and the changing of the guard. And then where are you tonight? Because it's a similar image, but it has somehow been fundamentally changed. And so if you think about the hero going through the journey, it is the same human but fundamentally changed, so. [00:45:47] Speaker C: Yeah. And he captures that so well at the end of the final song. I can't believe it. I can't believe I'm alive but without you it doesn't seem right. Where are you tonight? So he comes back. He survived it. He's made his descent into the underworld, and he returns. But just like Orpheus, who thought he was returning with Eurydice. Nope. He returns alone. And maybe all of these essential journeys have to be taken alone. [00:46:12] Speaker B: Anyway, that was. That's a great place to wrap up. We've managed to crack the code, right? I love it. It's an album about. It's about transitions, about transformation. [00:46:23] Speaker C: Right. [00:46:23] Speaker B: It's an album about just becoming someone new while staying the same person, which is really a microcosm of Dylan's career in many ways. So I love it. I think we made a pretty strong argument for street legal. And by the way, Aaron, I love is your love and being. I think that's a. I have problems with some of the lyrics, but that first verse, I think, is tremendous, especially. [00:46:47] Speaker A: I accept. Sorry, Graylee. [00:46:51] Speaker C: Oh, I don't hate on the song. I just. It doesn't rise to the same level for me. But that's probably if we devoted a whole episode to it. I'm sure it would become my favorite Bob Dylan song ever. And I will say that I think it is one of the more interesting resuscitated Dylan songs from obscurity in girl from the north country in the musical. I think they make very interesting use of that song in the context of the story that Conor McPherson's telling in girl from the north country. [00:47:20] Speaker B: Let's wrap it up there. Great conversation and I feel that perhaps we will have a street legal two talk talk in street legal two and we'll get court and Nina back in here. I know Nina is actually pretty anxious to talk about the album. We'll have to schedule that, but onward and upward in the meantime, and I want to congratulate Erin on her new podcast. I'm really looking forward to hearing it. [00:47:48] Speaker A: Thank you. Or watching it. [00:47:51] Speaker B: Or watching. You can have video. And also, I want to congratulate greatly on the continued success of his blog, Shadow chasing on Substack. I was telling Aaron earlier that I consider you two spinoffs of the Dylan taunts. [00:48:05] Speaker C: I do too. I do too. [00:48:07] Speaker A: But I'm not Maud. [00:48:08] Speaker B: You're not mocked. [00:48:09] Speaker C: Out. [00:48:10] Speaker B: I said one of you, one of his, one of his mod money is the Jeffersons. [00:48:14] Speaker C: Move it on up. [00:48:15] Speaker B: Move it on up. You can find out who's who. But yeah, this has been great and I'm looking forward to our next conversation and hopefully we can get the whole gang back together for the million dollar bash. But street legal is just a fascinating album. Love it or hate it, there's a lot to say about it, and I think we said a lot, but there's more. So stay tuned. Thank you, everyone. [00:48:39] Speaker A: Thanks, Jim. [00:48:40] Speaker C: Thanks. Till next time. [00:48:43] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Dylan Tons podcast. 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