Bob Dylan “Together Through Life”
By the time I arrived at The Beacon Theater in the fall of 1990, I was already in my Pre-Prime. Which is to say that, while I was still unsure about most things — including myself — I knew a thing of two about a thing or two. For instance, I knew how to get around the city, how to score weed and how to buy tickets from scalpers. I knew that The Replacements were important but that Milli Vanilli were not. I knew that Michael Bolton was funny in the wrong way but that The B-52s were actually funny. And I knew, with unwavering certainty, that Bob Dylan was a genius.
With the help of my Boomer parents, friends’ older brothers and Classic Rock radio, I’d heard our greatest living songwriter plug in on “Highway 61” and “Blonde on Blonde.” I’d heard him unplug on “Nashville Skyline” and “Blood on the Tracks." I’d followed his twists and turns. I’d read his poetry. I did not need more evidence — Dylan’s brilliance, like his importance, was not a matter of debate. By 1990, I’d accepted that Dylan was not cool like Paul Westerberg or (obviously) like Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson. But that was only true because he was perched high up on another level, beyond those young insurgents. At sixteen, bursting with hormones, I was confused by most things. But I was certain of Bob Dylan eminence.
For that one simple reason — my immutable certainty — I was surprised to see a diminutive, hunched, unkempt man in black, sequined leather and gloves amble on stage that October night. The man who I could only assume was Bob Dylan actually resembled Michael Jackson — but a version of Michael from seven years earlier, and with tangled hair, sagging eyelids and a five o’clock shadow. His appearance scrambled my mind. I thought — maybe it wasn’t a reference to Michael. But, also, it had to be. And, odd as it seemed, I was fine with that. After all, he was the genius and I was not. Who was I to question?
After my startle faded, and with the aid of a cheap dime bag, I was ready to laugh off the costume and enjoy an evening of Dylan classics. Except, once the welcome settled down and despite the fact that I’d landed excellent seats, I could not understand anything that was happening onstage. I started to get anxious. There was bedazzled Dylan. Next to him was the guy from the Saturday Night Live band — the guitarist with the fancy suits and the tight ponytail. Rock and Roll music was definitely being played. But I recognized none of it. Moreover, I could not discern a single word coming from the singer’s mouth. Was this all a joke, I wondered? Did all the adults understand something I could not? Was Dylan making fun of himself or of me? Was I in on the joke? Was he in on the joke? Or, was it even a joke at all?
It boggled my mind. For ninety minutes, I identified no melody and understood no lyrics. I thought I caught a shard of “Masters of War,” except it was played like sloppy boogie. I could have sworn I caught a whiff of “Simple Twist of Fate,” but it was played five times faster than the original and with zero heart. Confused, unsettled and — honestly — a little angry (I’d spent sixty dollars of my tutoring income for this?), it was not until the finale, “Like a Rolling Stone,” when the crowd stood and applauded, that I could reliably say to myself that I was at a Bob Dylan concert. Following his most famous song, he scuttled offstage, and returned for two seemingly disinterested takes on classics that I could only barely recognize. “Blowin’ In the Wind” sounded rushed — stripped of its generational significance, like like the opposite of a protest song. And while “Maggie’s Farm” faintly resembled the original, it more so sounded like a Dylan cover performed by Sonic Youth. When it ended, the future Nobel Prize winner walked offstage, the theater lights turned on, and I looked for clues to explain exactly what had just happened. I was rattled, convinced that I was Mr. Jones from “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Something was happening but I had no idea what it was.
Apparently I was not alone. While I could not find kindred spirits that evening — another disoriented teen or even a Boomer with an eyebrow raised — it did not take long for me to realize that Bob Dylan was lost. The consensus (and by consensus I mean Spin and The Village Voice) was that Dylan had been flailing for years. Opinions had apparently been mixed since 1979s “Slow Train Coming.” According to those grown ups, a glimmer of hope had emerged in 1983 with “Infidels.” But everything that followed — from “Empire Burlesque” through “Under the Red Sky” — was deemed either disappointing or worse. Unbeknownst to me that night at The Beacon, the mid and late Eighties were wayward times for Bob Dylan. And by the look of him that evening, the Nineties were not off to a great start.
Depending on who you ask, Dylan’s Past Prime begins either in 1979, with the start of his “Christian Trilogy,” or after “Infidels,” his last Eighties album to tickle the fancy of critics. And while I’m not particularly a fan of “Infidels” (thin and aseptic) I am a big fan of “Shot of Love” from 1981. So, for argument’s sake, let’s say that Dylan really starts to curdle around 1985, with “Empire Burlesque.” Over the next seven years and five albums, things began to unravel. Live and on record, Dylan sounded awful. Worse, he sounded lost. Fans scoured those records for kernels of his genius but failed to find reliable proof. His bands turned over and expanded and turned over again. Guest stars were invited in to help polish turds. George Harrison. Tom Petty. Elton John. Mark Knopfler. Jerry Garcia. Even Kip Winger (look it up)! But, they could not save their hero. Though I didn’t know it at the time, by 1990 many very informed people had started to think that Bob Dylan might be done for.
It’s possible that Dylan himself was one of those “very informed people.” Because, right around that time, middle-aged Zimmy did the unthinkable — he stopped writing songs. Or, rather, he stopped recording songs he’d written. “Good As I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong,” from 1992 and 1993 respectively, featured covers of traditional Folk and Blues songs. Neither album was a hit, but both were warmly received — hailed as compelling interpretations, as an effective use of his affected instrument, and as necessary “time outs” from his downward spiral. For a moment, it felt like the bleeding was over — that Dylan had turned some corner, away from crisis of middle age and towards the serenity of the second half. But after “World Gone Wrong,” he did something unprecedentedly radical. Something he’d never done before — he stopped putting out albums.
For four years, there were no new Bob Dylan records. But, in 1993, when “Time Out of Mind” did arrive, boy did it land. Dylan’s thirtieth studio album is languid, warm and clean. Its flourishes are slow and well earned. There’s no showstopper, but there are plenty of beauties. It’s aged, love weary, high end blues, performed by an aging, love weary, high end bluesman. It’s not an especially ambitious album. But it was a narrative-shifting one. “Time Out of Mind” lives at sunset, where it’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there. After a long string of misfires, Dylan finally sounded confident and comfortable. A triple Grammy winner, “Time Out of Mind” marked the end of Past Prime Dylan. In a different story, it could have been a fitting, and gorgeous, swan song. But this was not that story.
Over the next quarter century, ten more albums — including a Christmas record, three devoted to Pop standards and one where he covers himself — would follow. “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” from 2020, is considered the apex of fourth (fifth? sixth?) wave Dylan. It is a geriatric tour de force — sharp and introspective in ways that Dylan-philes had been waiting for, but feared might not come. Lost in the chasm between “Time Out of Mind” and “Rough and Rowdy Ways” is a quartet of admired and well considered, but not stop the presses and freak out albums of original material: ”Love and Theft,” “Modern Times,” “Together Through Life” and “Tempest.” Both “Love and Theft” and “Modern Times” were “hits,” earning Grammys and offering assurance that his return to form was no fluke. By the new millenium, Dylan had settled somewhere between reliable and predictable. For more than a decade, and notwithstanding the cover records, if you pressed play on a new Dylan album, you knew what to expect: spare blues and ballads, expertly performer, sung by a ravaged, voice of a generation.
If Past Past Prime Van Morrison sounds like disgruntled Soul, and if Past Past Prime Leonard Cohen sounds like breathy Tao, Past Past Prime Dylan sounds more like Willie Nelson. It’s the sound of an artist working tirelessly, but with an air of retirement. The stakes are lower. There’s nothing to prove. And even if he had an agenda it would be swallowed up by his voice. That voice. The voice of relief and release. The voice of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. If you squint your ears, those post-”Time Out of Mind” records — from “Love and Theft” through “Tempest” — sort of blend together. The bands vary. Stories and settings change. But they share a common pace, range and — most of all — voice.
Of that quartet, “Together Through Life,” stands apart, if just ever so slightly. Released in 2009, the album underperformed its predecessors. Reviews were middling to good, but not great. Sales were fine, but below expectations. It received the obligatory Grammy nomination, but no prize. Arriving on the heels of an economic recession, some critics suggested that it was Dylan’s most “embittered” record in years. Others more accurately described it as a “border town album” and a “Tex-Mex affair.” For a couple of weeks my local radio station played exactly one track from the record — "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" — and then, poof, it was gone. Overshadowed by the Hope of a new President and, in much lesser ways, the curiosity of a Dylan Christmas record (which arrived just six months later) “Together Through Life” was easy to miss. Moreover, it was easy to dismiss as more of the same — more haggard, lovelorn, sagely bluesman shtick. Dylan was, of course, famous for his shtick. And if anyone was entitled to it, it was he. But never in his career, not during the “Christian Trio” or even during his mid-Eighties slump, was he accused of being tedious — of making too much of the same thing. Never, that is, until 2009.
And yet, there it was — just sitting there, waiting for me to return. “Together Through Life” was the one Dylan album I’d forsaken. The one I’d conflated with its predecessors and successors. The one whose 5.4 Pitchfork review told me everything that I (thought I) needed to know. The one I skipped in spite of my affection for Heartbreaker, Mike Campbell, and my devotion to Lobo, David Hidalgo. In spite of the record being set in Texas, my (newish) home state. In spite of genuinely liking that one song I heard on KUTX. In spite of the fact that it was a Bob Dylan album! In spite of it all, I’d forsaken “Together Through Life.” I could forgive my thirty-five year old self for the disinterest. But, now at fifty — slower, steadier, more wistful but hopefully also a little wiser — my excuses were less convincing. If Steven Hyden and The Jokermen fellas could find pleasure down in the groove, surely I could find something of use in “Together Through Life.”
It turns out that I found more than just “something.” Whereas Daniel Lanois’ Dylan sounded languid and balmy, a decade later he sounds restless and sweaty. Whereas “Time Out of Mind” took place precisely at sunset, “Together Through Life” unfurls between the hours of midnight and three AM. It’s a humid album — a Texas gulf coast album. Formally, it is not so different from what came recently before — spare, Blues and R&B numbers, unremarkable if not for the skill of the player and the character of the singer. That unusual combination — the humidity of upright bass, accordion and slide guitar against the aridity of the singer — provides a tension that was absent from Dylan’s recent releases. Because these two things don’t go together — the humid and the arid — you feel like something’s gonna happen here. Like something’s gotta happen here. Like a storm’s brewing
But surprisingly not much does happen. There’s no storm. There’s no murder. No revenge. No real drama, even, other than in the rub between the dry and the sweaty. But tension is something. “Together Through Life” is at once gazing ahead, to the very end, and dreaming of the past. It contains the details of an actual life actually lived but it’s also always just a reverie. “Life is Hard” and “This Dream of You” sound like old sailors’ laments, like songs written a hundred years ago on a naval ship outside Galveston. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin” sounds an awful lot like Tom Waits’ “Down in the Hole.” “My Wife’s Home Town” is close enough to “I Just Want to Make Love to You” that Willie Dixon got a writing credit. “If You Ever Go to Houston” answers the question: “what if Larry McMurtry rewrote “If You See Her Say Hello”? And “It’s All Good” sounds an awful lot like “Don’t Worry Baby,” the Los Lobos stunner from “How Will the Wolf Survive.” Which is all to say that much of the album feels like a memory you can clearly place but not fully grasp.
Back in 2009, some critics ascribed politics to Dylan and (Robert) Hunter’s lyrics. The darkness, they suggested, echoed the depression of our economy. The directness, they claimed, confronted the cravenness of our politics. Fifteen years later, however, those reviews seem like either stretches or projections, or both. If “Together Through Life” is symbolic, it is existentially so — it is so in the way that we all feel the simultaneous pull towards the meaning of our past and the push towards the meaninglessness of our future. He’s still playing a character, but the character is more familiar than ones he’s played before. This Dylan exists somewhere between Tom Waits’ beatnik yarns and Doug Sahm’s hippie, shaky Blues. He’s heady, but more so rooted. He’s not trying to vex us or outrun us. In fact, the one thing that I can say about this Dylan — the most famously unknowable Pop star of my lifetime — is that I find him to be eminently knowable. And of all the things I either feared or expected, that was not one of them.