All the expansion promised in the Gentleman’s Mission is finally here. And just in the nick of time as I continue to live in Hungary, a country with almost no beer worth drinking (the limited exception being Dreher Bak). Although the wine is outstanding. More to come on all that later.
We start with Notes of Note: the musical portion of this website. Notes of Note will focus on all things musical: records new and old, instruments, artists, any developments in the world of sound and silence set to time worth noting.
This entry is devoted to Bob Dylan and his “Nashville Skyline”, a peculiar redheaded step-child that deserves a place in everyone’s collection.
Nashville Skyline
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It’s 1966. Bob Dylan sits relatively still, lighting smoke after smoke in the green room beneath the stage of the world famous Royal Albert Hall. In typical Dylan fashion, he is relaxed; he is calm. A young, blond haired English man stands at a slouch, fingers running rapidly up and down the ebony and ivory of blues standards. Alan Grossman, Dylan’s overbearing manager, fiddles with a misbehaving harp as Dylan sings the room into silence. “The empty-handed painter from your streets / is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.” He quietly strums on his beaten, but not yet broken, Guild acoustic. “It’s time, Bobby.” Bob straps up his electric and locks in his harp to the strange metal clamp around his neck. Still puffing, he makes his way through the darkened labyrinth of corridors, up the stairs and to the wing of the stage. Inching to the center, the crowd silent, he plugs in and informs his band of his newest, ever-changing ideas for the night’s arrangements.
“Traitor!” someone screams.
“JUDAS! Traitor! Where’s BOB DYLAN?” another audience member yells.
“JUDAS!”
Dylan stands at the head of a ready band, reveling in the calm before the storm.
“I don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” he states plainly into the microphone. He steps away, leaning towards his drummer, Mickey Jones.
“Play it fucking LOUD, man!”
Dylan’s audience is and always has been his most devoted and most severe critic. This scene from D. A. Pennebaker’s famous film, Don’t Look Back, puts that violent dichotomy on display.
With the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, this passion and devotion became a movement all its own. Songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” put words to the social anxiety and unrest weighting down the youth of the time. Communists, The Cold War, and a post-WWII false confidence left the public fearful of nuclear holocaust and consequentially instilled a hatred of war, violence and weaponry.
Dylan readdressed the concerns of nuclear rain, war-mongering hawks, and a unified cry for peace on The Times They are A-Changin’ and extended his eye beyond them into the political, tackling civil rights, racism, and social injustice. The public began to clutch to Dylan and his poet image, believing he expressed what they never could. But this Dylan could not handle. He was not a topical songwriter. He had no message. He never meant what he said. He didn’t mean anything. He simply wrote to write. He didn’t even believe in anything (which resulted in accusations of a “nihilist” attitude in the press).
He just wanted you to dig it, man.
And so, following the riotous electric outbursts of Bringing it all Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited that framed the drama in Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, Dylan left London in search of further release from the prison of his own poetry. With the taste of John Wesley Harding in his mouth, he set out for the South, musicians waiting and a batch of songs in tow, where he plunged himself deep into country music and found solace in its clichés, popular trends and the warm distance of Nashville Skyline.
It remains a bold outlier in the Dylan oeuvre, but stands also as a record with great charm and surely one of his warmest. The reason for this is not only the new country croon of Dylan that so many claim, but also the framework of country music, in particular its obsession with love, and the way Dylan chooses to embrace it on these recordings. Each song on Nashville Skyline is an ode to love and the lavender haze hangs heavy over this record, pushing the focus to the now, to the future, to the positive and new.
“Nashville Skyline Rag”, the second cut on the record and only song on the album without lyrics, is the most “country” of all. It is apparent in every pluck of Earl Scruggs’ banjo, every tear dropped from Pete Drake’s pedal steel, and every twinkle of a key from Dylan’s memorable piano line that this rag is about a different kind of love, a love not for a woman, but for Nashville, and a celebration of country music as a whole. It is a joyful release from the politics of meaning, and the meaning of politics. In the rag Dylan finds catharsis, a break and a home.
This catharsis is present throughout the record, manifesting itself not only in Dylan’s choice of voice as mentioned before, but also in the character of one woman, to whom Dylan expresses his lust, his happiness, and his feeling of security in this new place. As there are always two sides to Dylan’s coin, he is equally as ready to express his regrets, but rather than dwelling on them they serve as affirmations of self, cornerstones of belief that he must dust off to recognize and reminders that everything, at best, is temporary.
The opening number, “Girl from the North Country,” is the only one of near twenty duets recorded with Johnny Cash that was not rejected and sets the rose-colored tone. In classic Dylan style, this tale of lost love shows no anger, and only subtle signs of regret. It is his wish to be remembered, and remember, fondly that drives his plea and echoes in “I Threw It All Away” and “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”, two songs that postulate on the necessity of love and the perfection of hindsight. This is 20/20 vision of the past is not so removed from Dylan’s own personal life and his departure from the hearts and socially conscious minds of so many in the 60’s who saw him once as “the toastmaster of a generation”, an idea which Dylan felt, “needed to be uprooted”.
“To Be Alone with You”, “Peggy Day”, “Lay Lady Lay”, “One More Night” and “Country Pie” all refuse to be burdened by the pains of the past. We hear a happy, fun-loving and cocksure Dylan, wishing only to have fun right now and move on. In the spirit of the record, the message is commemoration, liberation, and celebration! When he says, “Tonight, I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, there are no expectations of waking up next to him tomorrow. He will, no doubt, remember the night and remember it fondly but, like the great trope of the traveler, when the morning comes he’ll be gone, leaving his past like footprints in the road, the Nashville skyline hanging low behind him as he moves toward escape, moves toward what it is in life that he wants: a different self-portrait and a new morning.
