by Peter Gorman

In the beginning the blues were old. It was traditional music before it even had a history, and the best blues were said to be the purest kind, without deviation from the tradition set forth by its greatest masters. So it was that through the years the blues were played according to the rules, and with some justification, as any expansion of the blues form tended to contract its soul. Yet this adherence to purity came with a price. The problem with the great tradition of the blues, or the folk blues, or even the folks, is the respect for for this tradition does more than stymie innovation; the tradition becomes sacrosanct, and the replication of that tradition becomes the (dead) end.

Dylan started out paying homage to traditional blues and folk music, copying Woody Guthrie, singing about death when he was 21 (he was so much older then). Then he began gradually moving away from those traditions before running head-on into them with his 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home. While his blues songs maintained the recommended rhythms and chords, and his folk songs preserved their different though no less identifiable (and hallowed) chords and melodies, the new found freedom in the lyrics and vocals on Bringing It All Back Home made Dylan an apostate. The album title was perfect; Dylan gathered up the past and took it home, then added to it. The title could have appended a parenthetical "Where It Has Never Been Before".

As the 60s progressed, Dylan avoided experimentation as defined by many of rock and roll contemporaries - melodic invention, tape loops, feedback and harpsichords were not for him. He kept his music firmly within the tradition while expanding that tradition, and from 1965 through 1968 he recorded his greatest albums: Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, The Basement Tapes (recorded in 1967 but released in 1975) and John Wesley Harding. Then the struggle began.

After his first album Dylan literally found his own voice, and sharpened it into a great rock and roll voice by the time his albums were labeled rock because the rock audience embraced what the blues and folk communities disdained. After the 60s his vocals were less focused, sometimes forced, rarely compelling. He sounds like he spent the early 70s recording albums while battling a cold and, except for Blood On the Tracks, his music never connected the way it had in his heyday. By the 80s his voice had lost its power, and he responded by singing harder. Often his vocals were strident, as were many of his songs, whether railing for God or against moon travel, and by 1985 his voice had become its own parody on that good-intentioned-road-to-hell of "We Are the World." Then in the late 80s he either found some peace or stopped trying so hard. Perhaps he stopped writing songs his voice could no longer sing, maybe he was merely tired. His albums from that time are at once both pleasant and forgettable. Then he gave up the struggle, and for seven years recorded no original songs.

In the interim, during the early 90s, Dylan put out a couple of albums of old folk blues covers, and he knew from where he sang, he knew what he was looking for even if he couldn't find it. Then in 1997 he released Time Out of Mind; finally he had found his voice again, a different voice, a ragged one, and wrote mostly great songs to match it. Time Out of Mind is often referred to as Dylan's death album, in part because of a near-fatal infection at that time, except that he suffered that infection after the album was already completed. Whether about death or love sickness, the album was the blues as suffering and struggle. His new album, Love and Theft, is the blues as anger and celebration. Or maybe Dylan's no longer singing the blues, he's singing the grays, something the old and wise sing when they suddenly find a new way of saying what people think they already know.

There's a song on Love and Theft called "Lonesome Day Blues," a thunderous 12-bar stomp on which Dylan's voice is so raw he sounds like a man who's been screaming for days and isn't done yet. His family is gone, dead or disappeared; he's celibate either because he's too old or too bitter, or both. While driving away from the mill he listens to the radio and mourns his mother. "Last night the wind was whispering, I was trying to make out what it was/ I tell myself something's coming, but it never does." It seems hope is dead, yet he then declares that he will address a crowd, perhaps a nation, some weird declaration of power that he doesn't have but has begun to believe in. It's a madman moment of defiance. The song is a tour de force with the accent on force, and on Love and Theft it's a gem among gems.

Throughout Love and Theft can be heard the sound of someone who knows what he wants and how he's going to get it. On the rockers Dylan is angry and determined, on the ballads he's temporarily at peace with the world. For arguably the first time he has recorded with his touring band instead of borrowing someone else's or hiring session players. Sometimes the musicians on his records withdrew into safety, session men as yes men, for Dylan too is sanctified, a folk/blues/folk blues idol, but this time his band breaks the glass around him. After hundreds of concerts playing along side Dylan without a fixed song set (the Dylan Web site lists 103 songs played in concert so far this year) or having a clue where his solos are going, these musicians long ago had to give up falling back on the familiar. On Love and Theft one can hear relaxed, knowing guitar lines from Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell, plus Campbell's playfulness on the violin, mandolin and banjo, with casual passages from organist/accordion Augie Meyers and driving rhythms from bassist Tony Garnier and drummer David Kemper. Dylan's in there somewhere, too. Listen to "Floater," on which every other guitar line and drum beat verges on cliche yet comes out sounding fresh, particularly the way in the instrumental breaks that the violin and slide guitar rise up together then fall in a musical sigh, while the drums thump under the crystal ringing of the cymbals. It's easy enough to slip into musical cliches whether playing the blues or rockabilly, and for sure those are great cliches, but cliches nonetheless, and dead on arrival. Dylan's band play the blues (the folk blues, the rockabillies, the grays) as if the blues, etc. were the next big thing rather than a sacred rhythm and chord progression.

Dylan and band alike sound as if they had the time of their lives recording this album. Among the rockabilly drum shuffle and the dancing duo guitars on "Summer Days," Dylan tries to squeeze in the words, "I said, `What do you mean you can't, of course you can,'" - repeat the past that is, but he can't fit it in the meter. The song is running away from Dylan and his band, and they have to race to catch up with it, no doubt grinning all the way. While the guitar line descends in the instrumental breaks, the drummer is holding back as if he's tottering at the top of the stairs, then falling, only to land upright and lead the band back to chase down the song again. Oh yeah, it swings.

There are moments of humor and joy in most of the songs, though always with an underlying admission that life is more hard than soft. "Bye and Bye" would be a novelty song in someone else's hands, with an electric guitar strummed and dampened that's right out of a 30s jazz or show tune, but the song becomes something else entirely due to the lyrical tricks ("The future to me is already a thing of the past," "I sat on my watch so I could be on time") and the sputtering organ notes and impish guitar lines that make it a joyful noise unto the past. "Moonlight" sounds like an elderly man getting over a hangover and crooning to a lover he might have met at church or a brothel. "Po' Boy" is all jokes and delirium told by an idiot. Even the anger songs ("Lonesome Day Blues," "Honest With Me," "Cry A While") find consolation, though in thoughts of fury, revenge, or someone else's pain.

"High Water (for Charley Patton)" is somewhere in between the tone of the other songs with its ominous sound, the tale of a flood on the verge of destroying a way of life. A banjo carries the tune, and if you never thought a banjo could sound ominous, well here it is. Blues icon Charley Patton only shows up in the title (he wrote and recorded his own "High Water"), while Big Joe Turner and George Lewes appear instead, and, strangest of all, Charles Darwin, whom the sheriff has trapped on the highway and the judge wants dead or alive. "Coffins droppin' in the streets like balloons made out of lead" is an image worth a 1000 pictures, while "throw your panties overboard" might be the ultimate throwaway line - the man's going to have him some fun before the flood takes them all away. A time to die, a time to forget death ever comes.

So much is made of Dylan the lyricist but, like all songwriters, his lyrics are a part of, not apart from, his music, and it is the musical performances that makes Love and Theft a great album. A lament called "Sugar Baby" is the final song, regret and hope mixing it up, regret usually winning ("Some of these memories you can learn to live with, and some you can't"). The lyrics are brilliant, but it's a pause in the music that grabs me, a moment after each chorus when Dylan sings, "You went years without me, you might as well keep going now," followed by a softly plucked guitar line that hangs in the air before playing a resolving final note. It is that suspension, that pause, that makes the song sound full of world-weariness to me, but when the next note is played the weariness is gone. It's as if Dylan acknowledges that weariness is part of the trip, but only a part of it, now it's time to get on down the road or at least get some sleep. Only a musician who has been down the same old road and found something new could do that, leading a band that's been there with him for quite a time.

Both Picasso and T.S. Eliot are credited with saying, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Credit it to Picasso and it comes across as bravado, a declaration that great art comes from those who appropriate whatever they damn well please. Credit the quote to Eliot and it seems more like word play; to borrow is to imitate and give back, to steal is to make it one's own. Both interpretations apply to Dylan's Love and Theft. Dylan's confidence is evident throughout; he knows his album is far beyond a mere white man's imitation of Blind Willie McTell, he even takes song titles from the blues masters. As for stealing, well damn right it's theft. He loves this music, loves it so much that he's going to take it away and make something of it himself. Let others stand in awe of the tradition and offer up their practiced renditions, making timeless songs sound immediately dated. Dylan's not smashing idols, he's dressing them up back at his place, bringing it all back home. Again.