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Versione 1
Rating:
“What’s this shit?”. Greil Marcus
"Let your house be a meeting place for sages, and get dusty with the dust of their feet, and drink their words till you are sated". Babylonian Talmud
Self-portrait? Self-parody? Self-help?
June 1970, “Self Portrait” is Bob Dylan, who has almost exclusively masterpieces behind him, and wants to outdo himself. But instead of trying to pass, once more, through the narrow gate of artistic creation, he chooses another path: sarcasm and distraction.
Tired of being a prophet or a herald, he wants to be the court jester. The sinister showman who smirks in front of the audience and, in his spare time, strings together choirs, sketches, lazy watercolors, flat pieces. He weaves the thin plot of a diaphanous world that slips, without reason, towards the useless pallor of the blank page. It whitens. With a flicker. With the same spasm as dust pierced by a sunbeam on a disappearing piece of furniture.
This time, Dylan brings the good of food offers to music. The Neziqin order of the Mishnah, meaning the “Cases of Damages” (custody of found objects, theft, testimonies, fathers). Recycling (The Boxer with two voices out of sync, a useless Blue Velvet, the worst imaginable version of Like A Rolling Stone). Or does he have a post-Dada gesture in mind? Less productive art, more conceptual? Well, all the weary horses in the sun of the initial angelic choir, he says, no longer allow him to ride, to run; the album opens with an operatic country-pop piece, where caressing choirs push the gaze among the clouds. And there is some sunshine. Better to linger on a fixed verse, then. And why proceed? Freed from the irreducible intensity of previous works (lyrics, music, performances, ensemble cohesiveness), the prophet of libertarian denunciation and the innovator of compositional languages vanish. After the motorcycle accident, Dylan is more reflective (death, fate, freedom, ecology), less visionary. He withdraws to live in the countryside, becomes the “ghost, which is just a person”. Tired of private interferences, controversies (Newport Festival, non-adherence to civil movements), he no longer wants to feel trapped “like a butterfly pinned”. So he causes dismay through the unexpected nature of modest content. He bundles it into a double long-playing record: rabbit skin, Alice’s mock turtle, a slow-motion mirror game, candy sticks, anemoscopes, skeins of dust, bent bristles of a toothbrush, poor materials. And might it be a criticism of consumerism with songs kept natural!
The artist from Duluth, in any case, didn’t make the album all bad. Not at all. Rather tepid, lazy like so many unresolved days. See how he sings. Nasal and raspy voice, few hums, some harmonious mumbling. He sings like a lark! Or like the croak of a frog from a shadowy nook. And he even lets us see the murky blue, right with the eyes of a listener. By the way, just like in the strokes of the cover painting: horrible, rough, uncertain, grayish, primitive. Then from twilight, he moves to the darkness of a single night on earth, but before and after an uninterrupted, crippled, sunlit, and clueless afternoon. What a noose of a self-portrait! So incomprehensible as to seem successful! And even acceptable in the light of subsequent decades, while the author rejected it. But with “Self Portrait” one also enters into a dialogue with Dylan, a dialogue that has neither a beginning nor an end.
Did Robert Zimmerman fully fulfill his task of being Bob Dylan here? Did he think only of freeing himself from others? From his own selves? A joke, a quarrel? Or an enigma? Not a poet, not a bard, not a prophet, not a revolutionary, not a utopian. What Dylan is this?
«I just want to go somewhere like other people
I like my sugar sweet
But jumping queues and hurrying
Is not my cup of meat
Everybody’s out there
Feeding pigeons on a limb
/… /
The cat’s meow and the cow’s moo
I can recite ‘em all
Tell me where it hurts you
And I’ll tell you who to call
Nobody can get any sleep
There’s someone always kicking at your feet
But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here
Everybody’s gonna wanna doze
Come all without, come all within
You’ll not see nothing like the mighty Quinn»
Dylan is "Mighty Quinn" (the original version will be on “Basement Tapes”), Quinn the Eskimo who arrives. An anti-messianic messiah, a poor, ordinary messiah, nothing like the one of the hard rain’s lead drops that will fall.
We are dealing with a “cursed” album. Both systematic and confusing. Systematic in appearance, confusing in substance. Let's do the math: double LP, 24 tracks, 14 his, 4 unreleased, 10 covers, 6 traditional piece adaptations, 8 covers, for 74 negligible minutes of crypto-enigmatic music. 50 musicians who, in various capacities, participate in the recordings. But often minimal instrumentation. Subdued tones, generalized flatness, stretched rhythms, inexplicable set list, lack of climax. Country folk and live cuts with audience whistles, and generally disjointed sound. Sloppy.
Are these the damages of an ego grown excessively and damned awareness of one's talent? Dylan is 28 years old. After the frantic and desperate work of the '60s, after the debated motorcycle accident, after a certain impasse, does his music want to become simpler and more harmonious? And meanwhile, does he draw from country and standards? From the particular, does he pass to the universal, change perspectives and codes? The mystery is fascinating. The songs a bit less:
the decent “Take a Message To Mary” of the Everly Brothers, the approximate covers of would-be Dylans (Paul Frederic Simon, Gordon Lightfoot), “In Search Of Little Sadie” with absurd and improbable harmonic turns, “Wigman” the incredible epitome of the album. The bucolic “Copper Kettle (The Pale Moonlight)”, by A. F. Beddoe, made famous by Joan Baez, is perhaps the best track (“Daddy made whiskey, and granddaddy did too/ We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792”).
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
01 All the Tired Horses (03:12)
All the tired horses in the sun
How'm I supposed to get any ridin' done? Hmm.
02 Alberta #1 (02:57)
Alberta let your hair hang low
Alberta let your hair hang low
I'll give you more gold
Than your apron can hold
If you'd only let your hair hang low
Alberta what's on your mind
Alberta what's on your mind
You keep me worried and bothered
All of the time
Alberta what's on your mind
Alberta don't you treat me unkind
Alberta don't you treat me unkind
Oh my heart is so sad
Cause I want you so bad
Alberta don't you treat me unkind
Alberta let your hair hang low
Alberta let your hair hang low
I'll give you more gold
Than your apron can hold
If you'll only let your hair hang low
10 Belle Isle (02:30)
One evening for pleasure I rambled to view
The fair fields all alone
Down by the banks of Loch Eiron
Where beauty and pleasure were known.
I spied a fair maid at her labour
Which caused me to stay for a while
And I thought of a goddess to beauty
Bloomin' bright star of Bright Isle.
I humbled myself to her beauty
"Fair maiden, where do you belong ?
Are you from heaven descended
Abiding in Cupid's fair throne ?".
"Young man, I will tell you a secret
It's true I'm a maid that is poor
And to part from my vows and my promise
Is more than my heart can endure.
Therefore I remain at my service
And go through all my hardship and toil
And wait for the lad that has left me
All alone on the banks of Belle Isle".
"Young maiden I wish not to banter
It's true I come here in disguise
I came here to fulfill our last promise
And hope to give you a surprise.
I've known you're a maid I love dearly
And you've been in my heart all the while
For me there is no other damsel
Than my bloomin' bright star of Belle Isle".
13 Copper Kettle (03:34)
Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil, Fill it with new-made corn mash and never more you'll toil. You'll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright, Watch them jugs a-filling In the pale moonlight. Build you a fire with hickory, hickory, ash and oak, Don't use no green or rotten wood; they'll get you by the smoke. We'll just lay there by the juniper... etc. My daddy, he made whiskey; my granddaddy, he did too. We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792. We just lay there by the juniper... etc. (LAST LINE REPEATED)
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By ilsuonatorejones
"What is this crap?", said Rolling Stone magazine when this album was released.
"I picked up 'Self Portrait' this morning. 11.99 dollars and 74 minutes of my life that I'll never get back."
