BOB DYLAN: EMPIRE BURLESQUE (1985)
1) Tight Connection To My
Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love?); 2) Seeing The Real You At Last; 3) I'll
Remember You; 4) Clean Cut Kid; 5) Never Gonna Be The Same Again; 6) Trust
Yourself; 7) Emotionally Yours; 8) When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky;
9) Something's Burning, Baby; 10) Dark Eyes.
So Infidels
had some good songs and a troubled, inadequate sound — but if you really want to learn the meaning of the
word «misproduced», look it up in an imaginary encyclopaedia and chances are, a
45-year old Bob Dylan with a puzzled look on his face will materialize in your
imagination and say, «See this jacket that looks like I've just dragged it
through a tub of lime paint? Actually, it fits me about as well as the
production style on my twenty-first studio album matches the songs I have
written for it. You don't happen to be a recording engineer, by any chance?
I've been sitting in this bottle for ages...» ...oh, never mind.
One hypothetical version of «the truth» is as
follows: Dylan never, not for once, truly «lost» his songwriting skills
throughout the Eighties. The melodies on Empire
Burlesque may not count among his most imaginative, but when we get down to
it, they aren't all that inferior to anything he'd done in the previous decade,
or even decades. The lyrics do range from cringeworthy (particularly when he
is in one of his «mass-moralizing» moods) to insightful, but consistently show
Bob's usual dedication to his craft. And he even makes some effort to sing
here, rather than just whine and mumble — age issues getting worse and worse
with every new year, so that his high «wheezing» notes are now more painful
than ever, but many of the songs still show strong will and power, which used
to be his saving grace even under certain off-key circumstances.
All of this means that at the heart of Empire Burlesque lies a really strong,
emotionally attractive and intellectually useful collection of songs. It also
boasts a fairly diverse and promising cast-of-thousands: unfortunately, «Sly
and Robbie» from Infidels are
retained on many of the songs, but several members of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers
are there to rectify the deal, including the band's fabulous guitarist Mike
Campbell, and even Ronnie Wood drops by to add his guitar parts to the basic
rock'n'roll of ʽClean Cut Kidʼ. With all these ingredients, it could have been a really good record,
with a healthy roots-rock / folk-rock sound that we hadn't really heard from
Bob since the days of Rolling Thunder.
And now the bad news. Although the credits say
«produced by Bob Dylan», there wasn't really any particular production job that
Mr. Zimmerman could carry out here — being either paranoidally afraid of,
or, more likely, completely disinterested in technological progress. Instead,
he just surreptitiously handed those duties over to his recording engineer,
Arthur Baker, a guy who was mostly famous those days for producing «special
dance remixes» for rock'n'roll artists, as well as collaborating with New Order
on such songs as ʽThieves Like Usʼ. The results were not just «unfortunate» —
they were a real friggin' catastrophe.
It isn't just the all-pervasive electronic drums
or the plastic, lifeless bass sound this time: it is virtually everything.
Sterile keyboards, inspired guitar solos that get drowned in the mix,
echo-drenched vocals that put the singer in an even deeper well than he
occupied on Infidels — everything
follows the great call of «modernization at all costs», resulting in an overall
sound that has nothing to do with Dylan and who or what he really is. If you
are willing to look past this production style, by all means, do so, and you
may eventually find yourself rewarded. But if you are not one of those who need
their daily dose of a Dylan epiphany, then why, you might ask yourself, should
you ever want to listen to an «electropop Dylan» or an «adult contemporary Dylan»,
when there is plenty of quality Dylan
lying around?
Arguably the worst nightmare of this record is
ʽWhen The Night Comes Falling From The Skyʼ, a song that began its life as an
uplifting polyphonic rocker with a Born
In The USA kind of sound (the original version has since then been made
available on Bootleg Series) and
ended it as a heavily sanitized, depressing electronic dance track. Where
«depressing» applies both to the change of mood from «angry / castigating /
condescending» to «panicky / whiny / pathetic», and to the effect that the implosive electronic percussion casts on
your nerves. It is particularly ironic that the final take was almost certainly
influenced by ʽAll Along The Watchtowerʼ — the same «ominous» type of
introduction, borrowing a part of those original chords — but if you are going to step in the same river
twice, you might at least want to check for any recent dumps. This here is Bob Dylan,
miscast as Kim Wilde; all that's missing is some of those hot dance moves to
get the blood boiling. (Actually, he is
trying to rock it just a little bit in the accompanying video, but I seriously
doubt any of the kids were properly impressed. What's he got on Madonna?).
According to Ron Wood's memories, the man just
didn't give a damn to whatever was happening around him — he wrote it the way
he wanted, strummed his guitar and blew his harp the way he wanted, sang it the
way he wanted, then left everything else, from overdubbing to mixing, to Fate.
Maybe his idea was that Fate would, somehow, intervene and go on spreading her
usual blessing, but this just wasn't going to be 1966 all over again, and much
of what was going around was just plain crappy, to say the least. ʽTight
Connection To My Heartʼ is one of his best contributions to the decade, a potentially
gorgeous love anthem that could have
been a masterpiece — but oh, those drums, oh, that robotic bass, oh, that awful
echo! As if this wasn't enough, the credits list Mick Taylor as lead guitar
player on that one, but where the hell is his better half? Who cut off
something like half of the frequencies of his sound? Is that supposed to be
«modern»?
It really becomes all the more painful when you
start struggling to look past the «ragged glitz» and see these songs in their
primary, imaginary incarnations. ʽEmotionally Yoursʼ is a beautiful ballad that
should rank among Dylan's tenderest achievements (probably inspired by his romance
with the backup singer, soon-to-be wife Carolyn Dennis) — and it certainly
deserves a much more tasteful arrangement than the adult-contemporary keyboard
soup it got here. ʽClean-Cut Kidʼ, with Wood on lead guitar, could have been a
decent-sounding Stones-style rocker with a poignant, if a bit too banal,
message on the evil influence of The System — instead, looks like The System's most evil influence has been on the
recording and mixing process of the song itself. ʽSomething's Burning, Babyʼ
has a simplistic folk melody that could be taken in any direction — so why did
the direction have to be this blend of simplistic New Age with equally
simplistic New Wave, as if the listener is being shoved face down into a set of
Casios and rhythmically dragged across all the switches and transistors?..
Small wonder that the only song that truly
stood out back then and truly stands out up to this day is the coda of ʽDark
Eyesʼ — credit must be given where it is due, as it was Arthur Baker's idea to
finish the album on a minimalistic note: just Bob, his acoustic, and harmonica,
like in the good old (oh so old) days. Dylan caught up on the idea, and came up
with a song here that would not at all feel out of place on any of his early
acoustic albums; you could very well swap it places with ʽRestless Farewellʼ,
for instance, on the condition of getting a time machine to a 23-year old Dylan
to sing it in a younger voice. He even falls back upon some of his old beatnik-style
poetry here, but the overall subject, one of «total focus on beauty», remains
clear and poignant. Too bad he was not able to focus on much of anything else,
though.
When it comes to any sort of judgement, I am at
a total loss here — it is one of those rare pesky situations where solid,
appreciable substance violently clashes against abysmal form, and in honor of
its relative rarity, I would like to have a special honorary thumbs down
for what might just be the worst production on a Dylan album ever (unless we live long enough to see Lady
Gaga's Meat Dress produce him an electro-pop extravaganza), but to reserve a
separate thumbs
up for some of his most inspired and tightest songwriting of the
entire decade. There! And now that it's done, I, too, want a lime paint jacket
and a puzzled look on my face.
Check "Empire Burlesque" (CD) on Amazon
"Bob Dylan"? More like "Dima Bilan", if you ask me!
ReplyDeleteFinally, Dylan gets introduced to the MTV generation as "the guy with hilarious hair who sings "When the night comes falling from the sky". The video for "Tight Connection" (inspired by the birth of internet, no doubt) is actually much funnier.
ReplyDeleteOh, and didn't he call EB (I can't remember whether it was "Chronicles" or something else) "his first album which actually SOUNDED GOOD"? Mad, mad guy...
Actually, both "Tight Connection ..." and "Clean Cut Kid" are songs that were recorded during the Infidels sessions. The former started life as "Someone's Got A Hold of My Heart" and the latter is still pretty similar to the Infidels version. Add to that "Death Is Not the End" which was the standout track on Down in the Groove and you can see just how amazing Infidels could have been.
ReplyDelete- HCE