Bob Dylan
Rough and Rowdy Ways

«I'm falling in love with Calliope:

she belongs to no one, why not grant her to me?

She speaks to me, she speaks with her eyes,

and I am so tired of chasing lies…

Mother of the Muses, wherever you are,

I've already survived my life for quite some time.»

Καλλιόπη. It had been at least eight years since the Muse with the beautiful voice, daughter of Memory, had visited the bard of Duluth, since a poignant prayer murmured softly interspersed with the immortal verses of William Blake's Tiger sealed the passionate dedication to John Lennon at the end of Tempest. That temporary farewell from his (barely) ceremonious travels, which began with the Bard waiting for the last train and culminated in the torrential eponymous poem about the sinking of the Titanic, was followed by a highly controversial Nobel Prize in Literature, a series of even more controversial collections of sparse cover songs d’antan (hastily dismissed by the public and critics as uninteresting "sinatradas"), and many concerts around the world. The tireless wandering dean of America's songwriters, nearing eighty, seemed to have come to a halt, at least creatively, as in the splendid verses of Not Dark Yet: «I was born here and here I'll die against my will / I know it seems I'm moving, but I'm standing still». Instead, at the most unexpected and unsuspected moment, just when the entire world has come to a halt due to unforeseeable circumstances, the indomitable voice of sand and glue returns to tell us new stories.

After all, Dylan had accustomed us to long pauses for reflection. The last notable one was in the early Nineties: even then, he needed two albums of covers, Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, to reclaim his roots and draw new vital energy for a songwriting that seemed exhausted. The result was an extraordinary rebirth, the last of the many in his career: the poignant beauty of Time Out of Mind.

Are we facing something similar? Not quite. More than a rebirth, this Rough and Rowdy Ways rather has the bittersweet taste of a farewell. Track after track, text after text, ballad after blues as he's accustomed us, the tone that emerges and imposes itself on the listener is almost the same that in recent years, and not without a hint of bitterness, we've heard in works like Bowie's Blackstar or Cohen's You Want It Darker: that of the poignant artistic testament.

This is not a cliché, nor an attempt to predict that this might actually be the terminal work of the former Robert Allen Zimmerman, the epilogue of an unparalleled songbook. However, it is about recognizing the traces of a fil rouge that runs through all ten tracks of this new collection, the first from a Nobel Prize-winning poet: what pervades and directs all the songs on the album is the feeling of the end (the end of an era, of a journey, of a culture, like that time that dies with the death of Kennedy, «the foulest murder»), indissolubly linked to that of passage, transition, the journey to another place: whether it be the crossing of Caesar's Rubicon (Crossing the Rubicon), imbued here with metaphysical values («The Rubicon is a red river flowing gently / redder than your ruby lips and the blood that blooms from the rose / Three miles north of Purgatory, one step from the other side / I prayed the cross, kissed the girls, / and crossed the Rubicon») in a devilish blues that melts into an exhilarating electric guitar duel, or the idyll of Key West, the southernmost point of the United States, buen retiro of Hemingway and Truman, «divine paradise on the horizon line», the right place for those seeking immortality, as sings the «philosopher pirate» protagonist of the long and inspired ballad - Key West (Philosopher Pirate) - which with its sweet accordion lacework and a melodic opening of the kind Dylan hadn't given us in ages (the refrain closely recalls the sumptuous Caribbean Wind) immediately stands out as an instant classic, not the only one the record gifts us.

Mandalins, gloom, and rarefied atmospheres à la Cohen mark the nightmare of Black Rider, in which a weary and sibylline Dylan prepares for a showdown with the Black Rider, perhaps a relative of Tom Waits' namesake devil but even more so of the Man in the Long Black Coat who took away the protagonist of the eponymous track from Oh Mercy: «Black rider, all dressed in black / I'm going away, you try to make me look back / My heart is at rest, I'd like to keep it that way / I don't want to fight, at least not today […] I'll suffer in silence, I'll make no sound / Maybe I'll win by moral higher ground / On an enchanted evening, I'll sing you a song». And even the supposedly only love song on the record, I've Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You, a fifties-styled slow paced by a sweet chorus hummed (throughout the album, in general, Dylan seems to have absorbed the lessons from his recent full immersion into the Great American Songbook), takes on new meanings once it's understood that it might not be a love song at all, but - like a new When the Deal Goes Down - a heartfelt prayer to God to be recited at the extreme moment: «I've traveled a long desperate road / where I met no other traveler / Many people are gone now, people I knew / I'm ready to give myself to You. / My heart is like a river, a singing river / Give me just a moment to realize / I saw the sun rise, I saw the dawn / When everyone is gone I'll lay by your side».

But the most memorable text of the bunch, for the writer, is that of My Own Version of You, where a more Mephistophelean than ever Dylan, with a spectral voice supported by a cadenced rhythm reminiscent of Ballad of a Thin Man, assumes the role of a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein in search, in a disoriented apocalyptic scene, between visions of Armageddon and Dantean hell, of «all the body parts needed» to create his ideal lover. The purpose of this creation, who will have «what they call an immortal spirit» that «grows inside of you from the day you were born», is clear and resolute: «If I do it right and competently, / I'll be saved by the creature I've created». An extraordinary metaphor of artistic creation and its eternal transformative and redemptive power in the face of dissolution.

Many are the tributes in these texts, in a tight name-dropping seemingly aimed at settling debts: with literary myths («I have a tell-tale heart, like Poe», «I sing the Songs of Experience like William Blake», «I contain multitudes» like Whitman), musical ones («Goodbye Jimmy Reed, give me that old time religion, it's just what I need»), with road companions and cultural models of a generation («I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track / like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac»). In short, a lot of Memory: the Greek Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, protagonist of the solemn, programmatic Homeric invocation of Mother of Muses; it is Memory that nourishes poetry, that creates the narrative: «Mother of Muses, sing for me, / sing of Sherman, Montgomery, and Scott, / and Zhukov, Patton, and the battles they fought, / of those who paved the way for Presley's singing / of those who blazed the path for Martin Luther King / of those who did what they did and went on their way / I could tell their stories all day long».

And it is to Memory that the wandering aedo consecrates himself on his last journey: a cupio dissolvi that resembles the end of Mr. Tambourine Man rewritten sixty years later, in Bob Dylan's final tribute—suspended here, more than ever, between the sumptuous melodicism of Shadows in the Night and the acoustic, essential folk of his origins—to the tutelary deity of his unrivaled artistic parabola:

«Take me to the river, free your charms,

let me rest a while in your sweet loving arms,

wake me, shake me, free me from sin

make me invisible like the wind.

My mind is wandering, wandering aimlessly:

I travel light and slow towards home.»

Last but not least, the epic of Murder Most Foul, to which a whole separate disc rightfully belongs, would deserve a separate review. About the longest track Dylan has ever recorded, about Kennedy, Wolfman Jack, Shakespeare's Hamlet and the spectacular endless playlist that unfolds in the second part of this saga, maybe someone else will sing with a better pick.