i sing of Slavoj fuzz and sniff
whose twitching heart rejoiced at, say,
the Lacanian
objet pe-tit a
(with apologies to
e.e. cummings)
I know this probably makes me something of a heretic, but I feel the urge to admit publicly that I am really much more of a fan of the mid0career Bob Dylan than I am of either his early recordings or his recent PR resuscitation, lingerie ads and all. I am thinking in particular of the mid-80's,
slightly-post-Christian phase albums like
Empire Burlesque and
Infidels.It's not, of course, that I dislike the early Dylan. It simply strikes me that when everybody (and I mean everybody.
English professors and everybody) start going on and on about how much of a genius you are, it might make for a body of work that is easy to mistake. And by mistake I mean, perhaps, not listen to (or not really) even if you have listened to it many, many times.
Genius is like that.
Genius is where this happens.
I think Dylan knew this. I think that this was behind much of his
career self-sabotage, beginning but certainly not limited to the episode where the amps were turned up and everybody booed him off stage.
So I think this is partially why I love those forgotten albums so much. Nobody listens to them (well, I do) and certainly nobody owns 'em (well, I do) and absolutely nobody would tell you with a straight face that they were in fact the
only Bob Dylan albums he owned (Yup).
This is not merely me being some sort of perverse music snob (though perhaps it is some of that). The albums, in one sense, are terrible. Dylan looks thoughtful on the cover of
Empire Burlesque sporting a blazer he could have easily borrowed from
Phil Collins. You can hear overproduction, bad
Yamaha synthesizers, and an unfortunate outbreak of
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on some tracks. I fully admit all of this.
But these albums also have tender moments, where the backing band is the
Textones and not Tom Petty, and the lyrics simply shine in their masterful brilliance. "Sweetheart Like You" and the insanely sublime "Jokerman" from
Infidels would be easy redemption for me, if I wanted to grasp for them at this moment. But I will not.
No. My all time, without a doubt, absolute favorite Bob Dylan song is all the overproduced,
Yamaha-infused,
Phil-Collins-coated terror I alluded to above. I simply cannot get past how much I admire and esteem "Tight Connection to My Heart."
I just think it is a great song.
I sing it in the shower and I cover it sometimes when there is a piano around or I am on stage. And it totally doesn't fit with what you are
supposed to love about Bob Dylan.
And this is sort of how I get into the whole notion of
Zizek's reading of the Lacanian Real as a disruption of the
ideology we're all swimming in that should be shaping who we are entirely, only there is this constantly
outbreaking perverse love that just
interrupts the whole smoothness of it all and makes you stand in horror and banal joy at the fact that you really do like the
back-up singers, the
Yamaha synthesizers, even the
Phil Collins jacket.
Like the hopeless protagonist of Hitchcock's
Vertigo, we are always attempting to dye the hair of our object of desire to make things "right." Which, for me, would be the moment where I say "
Yeah, I'm a big Dylan fan" without mentioning the perversity I have now admitted to you all. But there's always that
Bell Tower, looming, pulling each of us toward what we least want to admit - the loves we fathom but do not contemplate, except in those moments when the CD shuffles in just the right combination, and
Empire Burlesque makes the rotation again.
