Depression Bob Dylan Ascends To A New Musical High Point With Songs About Low Times
Bob Dylan “Time Out of Mind” (Columbia)
Two songs on “Time Out of Mind” “Standing in the Doorway” and “Not Dark Yet” rank among the best that Bob Dylan has recorded in 10 years. The latter could hang with his strongest work.
Just make sure you don’t have any razor blades or sleeping pills around when you listen.
“Time Out of Mind,” Dylan’s first album of new originals since 1990’s “Under the Red Sky” and due in stores today, is a powerful piece of work - as bleak as Bourbon Street at dawn, as real as spending the child-support money on whiskey and hookers.
The album, produced by Daniel Lanois, sounds like a demo and is better for it; some songs emerge from a confused tangle of notes and sounds. The music is loose and incidental: Guitar, drums, bass, organ and Wurlitzer piano play just enough of a melody in each song to support the weight of the lyrics.
Think of “Time Out of Mind” as being inhabited by the characters in Warren Zevon’s “The French Inhaler,” only now things have gotten really bad. (The album’s title, in fact, echoes a line in Zevon’s “Accidentally Like a Martyr.”)
“Time Out of Mind” is full of depression, anger and references to violence and death. Taken on its surface, it ranks with William Styron’s book “Darkness Visible” as a brutally honest, fearless attempt to describe the almost indescribable world of truly deep depression. Dig deeper, and you’re left with an album almost too painfully honest to listen to.
“I got no place left to turn/I got nothing left to burn,” Dylan sings on “Standing in the Doorway.” “Don’t know if I saw you if I would kiss you or kill you/It probably wouldn’t matter to you anyhow/ You left me standing in a doorway crying/I got nothing to go back to now.”
In a way, it would be nice to know if there really is a woman out there who has made Dylan’s life such a living hell. On the other hand, who cares?
With seemingly every tongue-pierced 20-year-old in the country singing about how much their lives suck, it’s nice to hear from a guy who’s actually lived long enough to know whether his life sucks and who has the talent to make you care.
For instance, when Dylan says he’s lovesick in the song of the same name, he’s not pining away; he’s literally sick of love.
Even when he’s in love, it’s a disaster: “If I ever saw you coming, I don’t know what I might do/I’d like to think I could control myself, but it ain’t true/That’s how it is when things disintegrate.”
In “Not Dark Yet,” something, apparently a woman again, has Dylan feeling so bad that “there’s not even room enough to be anywhere,” a subtle, powerful line that both washes gently over you and knocks you in the gut.
Later in the song he sings, “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear/It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
“Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” finds Dylan trying yet again to knock on heaven’s door. Along the way he realizes that “when you think that you’ve lost everything, you find out you can always lose a little more.”
Such a line - or, as is the case here, such a heavy blizzard of self-pity - could only be carried off by someone with Dylan’s cachet. And still you find yourself wondering why he doesn’t buy a Tony Robbins tape and lighten up a little.
In the beautiful ballad “To Make You Feel My Love,” recently covered by Billy Joel on “Greatest Hits Volume III,” Dylan finally finds enough peace to tell a woman how much he loves her, although even this song contains dark images: “I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue/I’d go crawling down the avenue.”
The gloom is broken up only by “Dirt Road Blues,” a cheerful little piece of rockabilly that could’ve been recorded at Sun Studios in 1956.
And then there’s the 16-minute “Highlands,” yet another seemingly endless slow blues vamp, this one about how times they are a-changing, how they won’t let him listen to Neil Young loud anymore and how he met a waitress in Boston once who asked him to draw her picture. Sit through that one a few times, and you might be tryin’ to get to heaven yourself.
Still, in a post-grunge age with Marilyn Manson serving as the new Alice Cooper and bands such as Live wishing they were dead, “Time Out of Mind” serves notice that real introspection consists of more than makeup, post-acne angst and pouty lips pointed at a video camera.
Sometimes, it helps to have had a life.