I'm home, having finished the
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues tour. It ended in Holmfirth Parish Church late last Saturday evening. Yep, the venue was a still-functioning parish church; a bit weird to have them set up a bar inside, and to see people taking their glasses of wine and beer into the pews.
Next day, it was the christening of grandson Freddie James Hodgson, in another Yorkshire parish church, and the day after that Sarah and I attended a preview of an art exhibition in a third Yorkshire church. I'm pretty sure that's the only time in my life I've attended church three days running.
The exhibition, called
Going and Returning or
Arriving and Leaving (Itus et Reditus), and staged at All Souls Church and the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, brings together work by Pam Day, Jonathan Adamson and the outstanding Andrew Darke. It's well worth catching, if you can, for Andrew Darke's work alone. It runs daily from now till Sunday and then on Saturdays only to July 18. The Bankfield Museum part is open from now till July 18 (except on Mondays). Opening times at both sites Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm, Sunday 1pm to 4pm.
Now then (not in the Yorkshire sense, ie as a greeting synonymous with "hello there"): Bob Dylan's
Together Through Life.
I've played it over and over and over again, especially in the car, where it works far better, I find, than in the living room, and I've tried very hard to like it. So I'm sorry to report that I think it a very poor album, its main appeal being that it's not
Modern Times, and, ipso facto, refreshingly unportentous.
That doesn't make it good, though. The writing is so careless that it's astonishing it took two people to come up with it and that neither said "Hang on a minute, we can do a whole lot better than this", and the voice - the shot voice that was used so skilfully on
"Love and Theft" - is mostly inexpressive, and where not, it mostly tries on sham or crudely cheap emoting. The music is plodding, the tunes dull and any sense of a need to communicate wholly absent.
Of course Bob Dylan is fully entitled to turn out as many meaningless albums as he likes, but I'm entitled to feel, as I do in this case, that if such albums didn't exist, it simply wouldn't matter. I don't really care if I never hear
Together Through Life again. And it says something about how steep the decline in Dylan's work has been in the 21st Century that I can feel that way without also feeling deep shock at finding it so.
It seems popular to say that this is a minor Dylan album on a par with, say,
Nashville Skyline: but
Nashville Skyline was radiant with beautiful vocals, sparklingly deft individual musical playing recorded with shining clarity and an unmistakeable generosity of good humour and vitality. It is a towering achievement alongside the shoddy sludge of
Together Through Life.
Far too many people, in my opinion, have rushed to try to find the album full of artistic virtue and insight about the human condition. People always do - like the idiots who come out of a contemporary Dylan concert and declare that he's never sounded better live. It's desperate self-delusion, and if Bob gets told this stuff himself, no wonder he's content to offer so little.
In 'Unbelievable', on
Under The Red Sky, he sings a great truth, if you apply it to his own fans and how we behave. He sings:
Turn your back, wash your hands,There's always someone who understandsIt don't matter no more what you got to say... or indeed if you've got nothing to say at all. And as the last line of that song has it:
It's unbelievable it would go down this way.
