Four stalwarts of the '60s make some fresh new music
Of course, Bob Dylan said it best. "Yesterday's just a memory/ Tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be," he sings in the chorus of a sweet and anxious love song on his new album. Infidels (Columbia) is a gruff and passionate reminder that rock-'n'-roll greatness rates a little patience. It also neatly marks an unexpected passage: yesterday's eminences energetically navigating their own channels of continuity. The past few weeks have seen major new releases not only by Dylan, but by Paul McCartney, elfin as ever; the Rolling Stones, who are still boogying on brimstone; and Paul Simon, still the musical poet of spaces between people where irresolution can kill passion with a shrug. These records are of varying quality, but all share a surprising point of unity. Yesterday is not just a memory, Dylan to the contrary. Rock's recent past continues to help shape its tomorrows.
Dylan has been undergoing a period of grave spiritual uncertainty, from which bulletins have periodically issued forth like dispatches from some ancient war: Bob has been born again; Bob's Christianity has waned and lapsed; Bob is searching for his roots in Judaism. The news was confusing; so were the records, like Slow Train Coming, that were issued in the wake of the gossip. Dylan's songs of faith managed to be reverent and uncommitted at the same time, as if, by singing to the listener, he was also trying to convince himself and calm his restless soul.
On Infidels, he seems reconciled to restlessness. He also sounds full of fight and the same kind of lacerating spite that passes through the heart like a spike. Jokerman, the album's stunning opener, carries a typically barbed and enigmatic rebuke: "You're going to Sodom and Gomorrah/ But what do you care? Ain't nobody there would want to marry your sister." The jokerman of the title, like many of Dylan's metaphorical protagonists, is part salvation hunter, part satanic twister, and the whole record is like a loosely arranged pilgrim's progress through emotional listlessness and political chaos. Sweetheart Like You, with a lovely and insinuating melody, takes the oldest cliche in the pickup book ("What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this?") and works from a sexy come-on into an image of hell all the more effective for being surprising and funny.
The state of Israel is ironically cast as the Neighborhood Bully, and it summons memories of Dylan back when the times were a-changin'. "The neighborhood bully just lives to survive/ He's criticized and condemned for being alive/ He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin/ He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in/ He's the neighborhood bully." Union Sundown is an agitated piece about how dreams of workers and solidarity have been sold out by greed, while the song that ends the album, Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight, combines tentative feelings of love with bleak reveries of fate in a way that no writer of simple love songs ever could.