Pretend with me and E.M. Forster (who probably stole the idea from someone anyway) for a moment.
Let’s imagine that all art is genuinely timeless, that all the artists throughout history are sitting in a room together, somewhere on some other plane, and that all their work - the books and movies and record albums and outsider paintings of Jesus in an Oldsmobile - is imported into our world at the same time.
Let’s say they appear without context, all at once, with no tags to tell us what came first or who might have stolen what from whom. Let’s pretend they just are, that we have no clue to the personalities behind them, that there are no publicist-prepared poop sheets and that you can’t consult your giant hidebound copy of the Rolling Stone Official History of Who’s Who in What We Call Rock ’n’ Roll.
Let’s just pick a record at random (there’s no other way to do it in our imaginary realm) and listen.
I’ve got one here, it’s from some dude called Bob Dylan, and it’s called Self Portrait. Let me stream it here on my imaginary frictionless brainwave set that will beam the music directly into your consciousness without disturbing the coffee drinkers around you. Here’s the first track, called “All the Tired Horses.”
Oh dear. What is this s * * * ?
OK, thought experiment over. Maybe you can listen without context, but it’s impossible (for me, at least) to write about Dylan’s 1970 album Self Portrait and the just-released The Bootleg Series,Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait, without introducing some history and referencing the original album’s place in rock history.
And before I get too far removed from my little inside joke, let me acknowledge that in the preceding question I am quoting the opening sentence of what may be the most famous record review in history, written by Greil Marcus and published in Rolling Stone. Later in that same review, Marcus would offer the comment, “I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”
It was a devastating review, probably the first (but hardly the last) time that Dylan would encounter the opprobrium of a major establishment rock critic. And it seemed wholly justified at the time, and years later Dylan himself would seem to affirm the judgment, telling interviewers that the album was an effort to subvert the expectations of his fans, who expected him to be more than a musician, some kind of leader of “Woodstock Nation.”
The pressure drove him from his enclave in upstate New York back down to the city where he’d first emerged as a Woody Guthrie manque in 1962.
“This was just about the time of that Woodstock festival, which was the sum total of all this bulls * * *,” the notoriously unreliable Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984. “And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any space for myself and my family, and there was no help, nowhere. I got very resentful about the whole thing, and we got outta there.
“We moved to New York. Lookin’ back, it really was a stupid thing to do. But there was a house available on MacDougal Street, and I always remembered that as a nice place. So I just bought this house, sight unseen. But it wasn’t the same when we got back. The Woodstock Nation had overtaken MacDougal Street also. There’d be crowds outside my house. And I said, I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, they can’t relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s get on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more. He ain’t givin’ us what we want,’ you know? They’ll go on to somebody else. But the whole idea backfired. Because the album went out there, and the people said, ‘This ain’t what we want,’ and they got more resentful. And then I did this portrait for the cover. I mean,there was no title for that album. I knew somebody who had some paints and a square canvas, and I did the cover up in about five minutes. And I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna call this album Self Portrait.’”
Some of you don’t remember 1970. The Beatles had broken up. The hippie dream had curdled - we’d seen Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. murdered; Charles Manson’s family had creepy crawled through Southern California and smeared blood on the walls of my 12-year-oldimagination. Aerosmith was formed. Some of us really believed that things were flying apart. Self Portrait was taken by some as evidence of the end of Dylan.
I did not choose not to buy Dylan’s Self Portrait because it was badly reviewed; I didn’t buy it because it was a double album and out of my price range. And, by the time it was in my price range, I knew of the album’s reputation as one of the worst of all time - it was right up there with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and William Shatner’s The Transformed Man. I didn’t own a copy until the ’80s, when my compulsive completism finally got the best of my common sense. I listened to it a couple of times and decided the critics were right.
FLASH FORWARD
But it wasn’t until the mid’90s when I really started listening to Self Portrait. I have a friend who seriously likes it, who thinks it’s among Dylan’s best records.
I want to hear what he hears, and while I can’t - most of the album still sounds tossed off and lazy to me, if not purposefully off-putting - there are a few gems. The moonshiner ode “Copper Kettle” - probably written by Pete Seeger protege Albert Frank Beddoe, though the original label had it as a “traditional” folk song - is one of Dylan’s finest vocal performances. (And those who contend Dylan “can’t sing” should listen to his otherwise completely disposable cover of the Rodgers & Hart doowop ditty “Blue Moon” or his obviously affectionate version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain.”)
In the end, I can’t recommend Self Portrait - while Dylan might not have intended it as an actual affront to his fans, it has about it the air of a contractual obligation record.Many of the performances feel like run-throughs meant to loosen up musicians and establish a mood in the studio.
Even taken in the best possible light - that Dylan was earnestly striving to create exactly what the title suggests - lack of cohesion and listlessness infect much of the album. While in retrospect the album is easier to understand now that we know more about Dylan’s penchant for vintage American roots music and his evangelism for obscure artists, Self Portrait suffers from a diffusion of vision.
Dylan’s version of Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” takes on a different tone if you know that, at the time, a lot of people considered the song a pretty direct attack on Dylan by Simon. (This might seem silly to people of the 21st century, but while these days Simon sometimes joins Dylan on stage, they weren’t friends in the 1960s. See Simon’s “A Simple Desultory Philippic” in which he references a man who is “so unhip, when you say Dylan he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas.”)
In context, the live versions of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “She Belongs to Me” make no sense - they serve merely to pad the album out. Similarly, the live version of “Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)” might be taken as a cynical move designed to capitalize on Manfred Mann’s hit version of the song, released in 1968. (Though Dylan and The Band had recorded the song in 1967, and a bootleg version was widely available - that’s how Manfred Mann heard it - the Self Portrait version was the first officially released by Dylan.) And, taste maker Wes Anderson notwithstanding, “Wig Wam” is a throwaway.
Yet Self Portrait isn’t horrid. I don’t hate it. It has a kind of cracked charm.
DIFFERENT FACE
The new product, the latest (and 10th) in the line of generally excellent Bootleg Series compilations, Another Self Portrait (Sony Legacy), offers a glimpse of an alternative - and possibly much better - Self Portrait (though among its previously unreleased recordings are versions of tracks that appeared on 1969’s Nashville Skyline and New Morning, which was released later in 1970, possibly as a reaction to the negative reception of its predecessor).
What’s immediately apparent is the starkness of Dylan’s vision - his version of the traditional English folk ballad “Pretty Saro” is superior to any of the old weird Americana you find on the original Self Portrait, even “Copper Kettle.” And the acoustic version of “Went to See the Gypsy” that appears here is better than the organ-driven version of the track that appeared on New Morning.
While Dylan was working mainly with guitarist David Bromberg and multi-instrumentalist Al Kooper on these tracks, George Harrison shows up for a couple of tracks, most notably “Working on a Guru,”which features a pleasant rockabilly guitar break.
While I haven’t absorbed the new set yet - 43 years on, I’m not sure I’ve absorbed Self Portrait - my favorite track on the new set is a gorgeous piano, violin and vocal reading of “If Not For You,” the simple love song that opens and anchors New Morning.
We are all of us revisionists, because we aren’t strong enough to divorce art from time or to transcend nostalgia. Not everyone is a completist like me; not everyone wants or needs a pointillist map of their favorite artist’s development. I cannot argue that Another Self Portrait is an essential document, even for a Dylan fan.
But I can say it’s better than the first draft.
Email: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 49 on 09/01/2013