BOB DYLAN’S SOUNDTRACK SONGS
…I’m in the wrong town…. I should be in Hollywood….
If you strain your eyes hard enough
at a Dylan performance, you will spot a small gold figurine wobbling on top of
one of his band’s amplifiers. It’s there at virtually every gig. Dylan has even
been known to grasp it and hold it aloof in apparent triumph during his
po-faced Brechtian finales. The figurine is the Oscar Dylan won in 2001 for the
song Things Have Changed from the
film The Wonder Boys. As ever with
Dylan it’s hard to tell whether he’s indulging in tongue-in-cheek self-mockery
or whether he’s genuinely proud to have won the award. Perhaps he’s doing both
simultaneously. His own creative contributions to cinema in directoral and
screen writing modes - 1966’s jumpy, chaotic Eat The Document; 1978’s gloriously amateurish panorama Renaldo And Clara and 2001’s slyly
political Masked And Anonymous - have
been explicitly anti-Hollywood in
style, following the dictats of the
improvisational ‘hand held camera’ methodology of Francois Truffaut and the
French New Wave ‘auteurs’ of the early 1960s (for whom Dylan has often
professed great admiration) (see shot from Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups to right). Yet it’s also possible to trace a fascination with
certain types of iconic Hollywood movies in
Dylan’s work from the mid-70s onwards. The Desire
album (1976) casts its protagonists as figures in various movie genres -
Mafia epics, doomed adventure stories, murder mysteries, spaghetti 
westerns.
1985’s Empire Burlesque is liberally
- if somewhat bizarrely - filled with snatches of dialogue from the films of
Humphrey Bogart and others. The epic Brownsville
Girl (1986) is a series of rumination centering around the Gregory Peck
movie The Gunfighter (see above left) 1989’s Man In The Long Black Coat and much of
the Under The Red Sky album (1990)
are written like a series of cinematic screen directions.
Whatever his
personal interests in ‘anti-cinema’, Dylan’s interest in generic Hollywood
movies form part of his creative focus on how the essential cultural language
of America
is framed. These interests have lately manifested themselves rather
differently. In recent years Dylan has contributed several songs to the
soundtracks of various American movies. Some of these films were successful,
others bombed without trace. Dylan seems to have treated these songs as
specific exercises in writing about a particular theme. The songs often attempt
to place the listener inside the mind of characters within whatever film Dylan
is composing for. This series of essays,
which is a follow up to the Modern Times
Track By Track series that I’ve been putting up over the last eighteen
months or so, looks at Dylan’s ‘soundtrack songs’ of the 2000s, examining how
they relate to both the cinematic medium and wider contemporary concerns.
(1) THINGS HAVE CHANGED (2000)
….All the truth in the world adds up to
one big lie…
It’s a hot summer day in some anonymous American town. The Man Who Has
Seen It All shakes his finger of XR Crown Royal lazily, watching the thick,
translucent yellow liquid slide around the tumbler. Nothing sticks. He stares
through the misty glass. Main
Street is busy as usual. It’s rush hour now. Car
drivers gnash their teeth as the purple fumes rise and horns blare. Behind him,
the waitresses glide by almost soundlessly, dispensing coffee refills. He leans
back in his chair. For just a moment he lowers his 
silver-framed reflective
shades to watch one of the waitresses lean against the counter, filing her
nails meticulously while staring off somewhere into space. She’s got a great
ass, and she knows it. Maybe she catches his eye. Maybe not. The Man takes a
deep breath and a gulp of whiskey. Behind the shades, his eyes show only
resignation. What else does he have? Two divorces, three uncontested alimonies…
A gleaming 1959-vintage Cadillac. A
long-suffering lawyer, four healed-up gunshot wounds. And a woman who’s gonna
take him for everything his has, who doesn’t so much suck his dick as suck out
his soul. Of
course, it wasn’t always like this. Yet… what you gonna do? There’d always
been too much temptation at every crossroads…
Things
Have Changed was written for the 2000 film The Wonder Boys, 
directed by Curtis Hansen and starring Michael
Douglas (right) as (the ironically named) Grady Tripp, a disillusioned middle-aged and
formerly radical college professor whose personal and professional life has
been plunged into turmoil. The film is a witty examination of the main
character’s mid-life crisis, reflecting wryly on how he struggles to complete
his latest novel while conducting an affair with his boss’ wife and struggling
to contain his own excessive alcohol habit. There may well have been personal
reasons for Dylan’s interest in such a story, if the autobiographical implications
of songs of mid-life confusion like Standing
In The Doorway and Trying To Get To
Heaven (Before They Close The Door) on 1997’s Time Out Of Mind are to be assumed. By the time of Things Have Changed, Dylan - who had
survived a life-threatening illness in the meantime - seems to have undergone a
great uplift in spirits since the often dark soul-searching of Time Out Of Mind. Suddenly we were
hearing a mischievous, giddy and joyously funny
Dylan, the like of which we’d not heard for many moons. Things Have Changed’s sprightly tone
anticipates the supercharged word games and sly postures of the next year’s Love And Theft. And its tone accurately
reflects that of The Wonder Boys
itself, which is a kind of comedy of modern disillusionment.
This new brightness (and lightness)
of tone is immediately signalled by the attractive rhythmic shuffle, shaded by
almost Latin percussion, which opens the track. For perhaps the first time in
his career, and on the cusp of his own seventh decade, Dylan is finally making
music you can dance to. With typical
insouciance he even refers to this new musical ‘career’: …Gonna take dancing lessons/ Do the jitterbug rag… The voice here is
a finely judged, gravelly whisper, which perfectly fits the tone and subject
matter of the song, especially in the tiny understated sighs which he uses at
various dramatic moments. Despite his professedly disenchanted situation and
attitude, Dylan’s narrator seems to be somewhat detached from the events he’s
describing. …I've been trying to get as
far away from myself as I can… he tells us.
The song’s lyrics are sharply-honed
with many delightfully ironic touches, none more so than in the description of
the woman sitting on his lap drinking champagne. …Got
white skin… he purrs …got assassin’s
eyes… / I’m staring up into the sapphire-tinted skies… Dylan’s tongue
slides around the alliteration, positively wallowing in the delicious contrast
in these lines. The narrator appears to be wealthy and ‘well-dressed’, perhaps
a kind of ageing roué with a young, gold-digging beauty in tow. …I’m in love with a woman… he confesses
later …that don’t even appeal to me… His
mind is clearly elsewhere. Despite his wealth and power he is trapped.
Unusually for Dylan, the song has a series of middle-eights, helping to lead in
to the rather attractively catchy (and almost hummable) chorus. The lines in
these sections seem to represent the narrator’s mind wandering off in strange
directions. In the first one he pictures himself …Standing on the gallows with my
head in a noose… which may be an ironic depiction of the trap he’s got
himself into by following a debauched, unfocused lifestyle. …Any minute now… he breathes in that
understated growl …I’m expecting all hell
to break loose… , though he hardly sounds like he’s getting himself into a
sweat over it. The ‘singalong’ chorus
again indicates a narrator who is barely engaged with the world, suffocated by
his own ennui. …People are crazy, times
are strange… he tells us, with an air of passive acceptance. But then he
proceeds to confess that … I’m locked in tight/ I’m out of range… He
is a prisoner, it seems, of his own boredom. He knows he is trapped but cannot
be bothered to do anything about it: …I
used to care… he sighs …but things
have changed…
The
next verse contains the song’s funniest lines. …This place ain’t doin’ me any good.. he muses. …I’m in the wrong town/ I should be in Hollywood… He’s hardly gained any sympathy from us so
far, and this makes him sound even more comically decadent. It’s as if he’s
leaning back on his bar stool, feeling maudlin, expecting us to give him some
sympathy when he knows full well he doesn’t deserve it. In his misty-eyed,
drunken reverie he seems to be indulging in some bizarre prewar Hollywood
fantasy: …Gonna take dancing lessons, do
the jitterbug rag/ Ain’t no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag… he declares, as
if he’s banging his glass of bourbon down on the bar, expecting some bored
waitress to sympathise with him. But then he begins to grow bitter. …Only a fool in here… he tells us ...would think he’s got anything to prove… In the next middle eight he indulges in rather
vague clichés about how life has passed him by: …Lot of water under the bridge, Lot of
other stuff too… he says. Then he tips his hat to his imagined audience: …Don’t get up gentlemen… he insists (as
if they would!) …I’m only passing
through…
As
our hero grows ever more maudlin the song takes a darker turn. Earlier on he
had alluded to …waiting on the last
train… Now he expands on this apocalyptic hint: …If the Bible is right… he sings
…the world will explode… His drunken haze begins to lead him into darker
moods and he seems to fear some kind of judgement from on high. Hell, it seems,
is just around the corner. …Some things
are too hot to touch… he mutters darkly. He begins to wallow in self-pity,
confessing hat …I’ve been trying to get
as far away from myself as I can… By the next middle eight he seems to have
actually fallen right off his barstool. He adopts a tragicomic and rather
ridiculous tone: …Feel like falling in
love with the first woman I meet/ Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling
her down the street… In the last
verse he twists his tongue around lines that recall classic country ‘face in
the beerglass’ laments: …I hurt easy, I
just don't show it/ You can hurt someone and not even know it… The logic of
the coup-de-grace line … All the truth in
the world adds up to one big lie… is similarly illogical and inebriated. Finally
there is a random reference to …Mr. Jinx
and Miss Lucy… who we are told …jumped
in the lake… The narrator declares that …I’m
not that eager to make a mistake… ‘Mr. Jinx’ was a ‘beatnik’ cat in
Hanna-Barbera’s late 1950s cartoon Pixie
and Dixie. But the narrator himself is, of course, a kind of ‘Mr. Jinx’.
His life, he feels, is one long jinx.
Things
Have Changed comments rather obliquely on the character of Grady Tripp in The Wonder Boys. The persona Dylan
adopts is, like Tripp, a drunken cynic who laments the death of his own
morality With the apparently explicit reference to Dylan’s 1964 The Times They Are A-Changin’ in the
chorus, it is tempting to think of him as an emblematic figure of our ‘modern
times’. Yet the song is far from being the rantings of a cynical old man. It
breathes with wit, with new life. Indeed it winks sardonically at the habit of
false nostalgia. There’s actually nothing in the song that says that the
narrator speaks from the present day. Maybe he’s in the 50s, or even the 20s,
when you might well learn the ‘jitterbug drive’. The narrator is in some ways
reminiscent of the Hollywood director Sullivan
in Preston Sturges’ brilliantly satirical classic movie Sullivan’s Travels (1941), who attempts to ‘find out how the poor
live’ by attempting to become a hobo himself, with disastrous results. Sullivan
finds that escaping from Hollywood
is no easy matter - for much of the film he continually finds himself landing
back there. This ambiguity about where and when songs are set will be a strong
feature of both Love and Theft and Modern Times. So Things Have Changed is a kind of manifesto for Dylan’s work of the
2000s, where ‘the future is only a thing of the past’. Freed from the shackles
of the despair which he so memorably exorcises in Time Out Of Mind, Dylan puts on his snazzy dress suit and his
dancing shoes to face the new millennium with a sly smile, a knowing wink and a
twirl of his cane.
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Hello again. Been very busy but hope to be getting these blogs up more regularly. Will be covering Waiting On You, Cross The Green Mountain, Tell Ol' Bill, Huck's Tune in the series before going on to do Love And Theft: Track By Track.
As usual I welcome any comments. You can leave them below or write directly to me at chris@chrisgregory.org
My book WHO COULD ASK FOR MORE: RECLAIMING THE BEATLES is now available
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