BORN
IN TIME
… I walk alone through
the shakin’ street…
In recent years, in his interviews and in his Theme Time Radio Hour show, Bob Dylan has professed considerable
admiration for ‘crooners’ like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. This may have
come as something of a surprise to those who associated Dylan with the
deliberate harshness of his early 60s vocal style and the pronounced unsentimentality
and emotional detachment in his early love songs like It Ain’t Me Babe, Don’t Think
Twice, It’s All Right and One Too
Many Mornings. Yet, as his radio show and his reminiscences in Chronicles Volume One reveal, Dylan’s
tastes have always been highly eclectic. Since the mid-80s, his embrace of
mainstream ‘romantic’ tradition in American song has grown to become a more and
more prominent feature of his work. He
had flirted with such material before, most notably on the unfairly maligned Self Portrait album in 1970, but his own
songs of the 60s and 70s had pretty much all been composed within the framework
of folk, country and blues disciplines. By the time of 1985’s Empire Burlesque he was making tentative
forays into ‘Great American Songbook’ territory with ballads like I’ll Remember You and Emotionally Yours, both of which were
couched in conventional romantic terminology and were structured like
‘professional’ pop songs with middle-eight passages designed as a counterpoint
to the songs’ melodies.
At this point, however, Dylan could be
said to be still finding his way with the form. These songs come over like
deliberate exercises in writing the kind of songs people did not associate Bob
Dylan with. By the late 90s, however, the inclusion of a far more fully realised
piece of work like To Make You Feel My
Love suggested that Dylan had been able to integrate such material in more
credible way into his performing and songwriting repertoire. In songs of the
2000s like Moonlight, Bye And Bye, Beyond The Horizon, When The Deal Goes Down and Life Is Hard he would explore the
nuances of such styles in more detail and would find ways of fusing such
stylizations with more poetic and experimental lyrical forms. Born In Time, which originally appeared
on the Under The Red Sky album in
1990, is positioned somewhere between the earlier and the later material. Its
tone is romantic and wistful and it attempts to marry romantic cliché with
poetic metaphor. Its effectiveness depends very much on the passion and
conviction with which it is performed. The two versions of the song which
appear on Tell Tale Signs are drawn
from the sessions from the Oh Mercy
album. The version on CD3 appears to be an earlier draft, with significantly
different lyrics. But both versions are performed more convincingly that the
version on Under The Red Sky, where
the vocal sounds a little strangled by Don Was’ rather messy production. It is not surprising that the song was not
selected for inclusion on Oh Mercy as
its tone and content are out of step with the delicate balance between
spiritual despair and transcendent hope that the album sets up. Born In Time is a kind of experiment in
romanticism. It juggles a kind of poetic mysticism with romantic cliché in ways
that are sometimes quite striking.
The song seems to be addressed to a
lover from the narrator’s (perhaps distant) past. The notion of being ‘born in
time’ is an interesting one, given Dylan’s stated ambition to ‘stop time’ in
his songs, and the fact that the song seems to be comprised of a series of
reminiscences which appear in no particular chronological order. In
the first verse we enter the song’s dream world through the …stardust of a pale blue light… The
narrator’s statement that … I think of
you in black and white… sets the love affair in some unnamed past decade.
The statement that …we were made of
dreams… also places the remembered relationship in an apparently more
innocent past time. Then we are plunged
into the dream itself. The lines: …. I
walk alone through the shakin’ street/ Listenin’ to my heart beat/ In the
record breakin’ heat…are perhaps the most evocative in the song, taking us
to the heart of what the narrator is feeling. He is ‘shaking’ with the feeling
of the memory, overwhelmed by the ‘record breakin’ heat’ of of passion, and all
he can hear is the sound of his own heartbeat. The lines have a strongly
suggestive poetical and musical resonance which effectively conveys a sense of
nostalgic longing and regret. The regret the narrator feels seems to be as much
for the fact that the ‘heat’ of his own passion can only now be found in a
dream of the past as for the love object herself. The love he is describing is
timeless, yet also anchored in a particular time and place.
The first of the song’s two ‘middle
eight’ or ’bridge’ sections follows. There are substantial differences between
the lyrics of the two versions here and this entire section was changed again
for Under The Red Sky. After the
evocative suggestiveness of what has come earlier Dylan seems to be struggling
with his attempt to use cliché in an appropriate way. The Disc Three version
runs ….You were high, you were low/ You
were so easy to know… which is
succeeded by …You were smooth, you were
rough/ You were more than enough… both
of which sound rather forced. At least …oh
babe, why did I ever leave ya, or grieve ya… which follows, is direct,
showing the narrator’s regret in no uncertain terms. This is also an effective
contrast to the poetic leap at the beginning of the next verse: … On the rising curve/ Where the ways of
nature will test every nerve… a prescient and evocative description of how
it feels to commit oneself emotionally in a relationship. This is reinforced by
the even more regretful line : …
I
took you close and got what I deserved… There is a kind
of emotional honesty here which is missing in the Under The Red Sky version which features the rather vague and
equivocal …You won’t get anything you
don’t deserve…
The
second bridge section features the effectively jarring … Just when I knew who to thank/ You
went blank… This works as a contrast against the rather
odd ….You were snow, you were rain/ You
were striped, you were plain… an describe the girl’s changing nature which
descends into near-absurdity. In the final verse the references to the …hills of mystery… and the …foggy web of destiny… indeed tend to
‘fog’ the meaning of the song in rather vague metaphor. The song thus flits
between effective poetic moments and a sense of uncertainty. The relationship
being described arguably needs to be anchored more clearly in a specific time
and place to engage the listener. Born In
Time thus never really delivers what the intriguing nature of its refrain
and the evocative quality of its earlier verses promises us. Dylan is
attempting to fuse different modes of expression here, with decidedly mixed
results. But the song can be seen as a stepping stone, and arguably an
important one, between one mode of expression and another. None of the three released versions quite manage
to realise the potential inherent in its best lines. But in its presentation of
these two early versions of the song, Tell
Tale Signs further reveals the processes that Dylan was experimenting with
in the evolution of the new stylistic modes that came to dominate his work in
the late ‘90s and the 2000s.
The subject of the song is not so
much the love affair but the memory
of the affair, which is now fading, and Dylan seems to be challenging himself
to see if he can still feel that ‘record breakin’ heat’. Thus the way the song
veers between poetry and cliché is actually quite appropriate. The singer seems
to be questioning how valid his own memories are, and in doing so he inevitably
swings between poetic detachment and sentimentality. While the young Dylan
rejected sentimentality entirely, in both his lyrics and his (deliberately)
harsh vocal style, by his late 20s (around the time of Nashville Skyline, when he himself was happily married) he was
already beginning to grapple with the fact that feelings of love can in themselves
be sentimental. Much of his
subsequent treatment of love in song has tried to balance these dynamics. Often,
as in the Desire’s heartbreaking confessional
Sara or in the inner struggles
depicted in much of the introspective material on Time Out Of Mind, he has seemed to be drowning in a kind of
sentimental despair. Later, in the songs from his albums of the 2000s, he uses
a detached, tongue-in-cheek levity to balance such feelings. Born In Time sits somewhere in between
these poles, a song of uncertainty whose sometimes faltering tone questions its
own veracity. It is a song in which the narrator tries to convince himself that
he really feels something. And we are
never quite sure whether these feelings are real or not.
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