mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about;
it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back. It is the awesome, impenetrable fatalism that drives the timeless ballads first recorded in the twenties; songs like Buell Kazee’s “East Virginia,” Clarence Ashley’s “Coo Coo Bird,” Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues”—or a song called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” put down by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928. “I wish I was a mole in the ground—like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down—And I wish I was a mole in the ground.”
Now, what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to really comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his life, and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised; like a mole in the ground, he wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one; he wants to destroy the world, and to survive it.
Dylan and the Band came to terms with such feelings—came to terms with the void that looks back—in the summer of 1967; in the most powerful and unsettling songs on The Basement Tapes, they put an old, old sense of mystery across with an intensity that has not been heard in a long time. You can find it in Dylan’s singing and in his lyrics on “This Wheel’s on Fire”—and in every note Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko play.
And it is in this way most of all that The Basement Tapes are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory; it might be why The Basement Tapes are, if anything, more compelling today than when they were first made, no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” or Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” The spirit of a song like “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” matters here not as an influence, and not as a source. It is simply that one side of The Basement Tapes casts the shadow of such things, and in turn is shadowed by them.
DYLAN GETS NASTY
Village Voice
18 October 1976
There was a moment in Bob Dylan’s recent Hard Rain TV special, filmed in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the end of the Rolling Thunder tour, that I hope I never forget: when Dylan turned “Idiot Wind” into the roughest outlaw ballad in the book. Just into the first verse he lowered his head; with a turn of a line, he seemed to take in the whole history of the place in which he was singing, to understand in an instant the lives of such Colorado killers as Kid Curry and the Sundance Kid. His face alive with evil and glee, Dylan was suddenly the lowest, dirtiest, meanest killer of them all. “I can’t help it—if I’m lucky. ” His eyes snapped and I cringed.
The show was filmed without competence or imagination. The radical chic A-rab outfits were dumb, and it was obvious even while watching that Dylan’s presence was overshadowing any questions of musical quality. But that presence was so strong, so nasty, that it cut through everything in its way. The man came across. I was shocked when the credits ran; nothing like an hour seemed to have elapsed. As far as I was concerned the show could have gone on all night.
But Hard Rain, the soundtrack (and then some, and less some) of the show, is Dylan’s worst authorized album—without Dylan’s visual presence the music dies on the turntable. I never saw the Rolling Thunder tour, and the Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Folkie Division) concept of the affair sounded less than thrilling, but it’s hard to believe the jumbled, random, offensively casual mess on this album represents the best music the tour produced. The musicians don’t play, they bump into each other. Dylan doesn’t phrase, he bleats, and for the first time in his career, he sounds stupid. There is no musical attack, no rhythm, no craft. The arrangements are pointless—nearly nonexistent, as with “Memphis Blues Again,” or philistine, as with “Maggie’s Farm.” (Are those long, ridiculously
it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back. It is the awesome, impenetrable fatalism that drives the timeless ballads first recorded in the twenties; songs like Buell Kazee’s “East Virginia,” Clarence Ashley’s “Coo Coo Bird,” Dock Boggs’ “Country Blues”—or a song called “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” put down by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928. “I wish I was a mole in the ground—like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down—And I wish I was a mole in the ground.”
Now, what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to really comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his life, and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised; like a mole in the ground, he wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one; he wants to destroy the world, and to survive it.
Dylan and the Band came to terms with such feelings—came to terms with the void that looks back—in the summer of 1967; in the most powerful and unsettling songs on The Basement Tapes, they put an old, old sense of mystery across with an intensity that has not been heard in a long time. You can find it in Dylan’s singing and in his lyrics on “This Wheel’s on Fire”—and in every note Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko play.
And it is in this way most of all that The Basement Tapes are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory; it might be why The Basement Tapes are, if anything, more compelling today than when they were first made, no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train” or Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain.” The spirit of a song like “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” matters here not as an influence, and not as a source. It is simply that one side of The Basement Tapes casts the shadow of such things, and in turn is shadowed by them.
DYLAN GETS NASTY
Village Voice
18 October 1976
There was a moment in Bob Dylan’s recent Hard Rain TV special, filmed in Fort Collins, Colorado, at the end of the Rolling Thunder tour, that I hope I never forget: when Dylan turned “Idiot Wind” into the roughest outlaw ballad in the book. Just into the first verse he lowered his head; with a turn of a line, he seemed to take in the whole history of the place in which he was singing, to understand in an instant the lives of such Colorado killers as Kid Curry and the Sundance Kid. His face alive with evil and glee, Dylan was suddenly the lowest, dirtiest, meanest killer of them all. “I can’t help it—if I’m lucky. ” His eyes snapped and I cringed.
The show was filmed without competence or imagination. The radical chic A-rab outfits were dumb, and it was obvious even while watching that Dylan’s presence was overshadowing any questions of musical quality. But that presence was so strong, so nasty, that it cut through everything in its way. The man came across. I was shocked when the credits ran; nothing like an hour seemed to have elapsed. As far as I was concerned the show could have gone on all night.
But Hard Rain, the soundtrack (and then some, and less some) of the show, is Dylan’s worst authorized album—without Dylan’s visual presence the music dies on the turntable. I never saw the Rolling Thunder tour, and the Mad Dogs & Englishmen (Folkie Division) concept of the affair sounded less than thrilling, but it’s hard to believe the jumbled, random, offensively casual mess on this album represents the best music the tour produced. The musicians don’t play, they bump into each other. Dylan doesn’t phrase, he bleats, and for the first time in his career, he sounds stupid. There is no musical attack, no rhythm, no craft. The arrangements are pointless—nearly nonexistent, as with “Memphis Blues Again,” or philistine, as with “Maggie’s Farm.” (Are those long, ridiculously
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