TEMPEST TRACK BY TRACK

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Below are links to my commentaries on all the tracks on Bob Dylan’s album Tempest. They don’t pretend to offer comprehensive analyses, just my responses to some very complex and resonant songs.

Tempest is a magisterial work — a sweeping, disquieting, profound survey of our world and times. There has never been anything quite like it in American art, and there may never be anything quite like it again. As far as I’m concerned it takes its place with Moby Dick and Leaves Of Grass and Huckleberry Finn as a classic work in the national canon.

Click on the titles of the songs for the commentaries.

Duquesne Whistle

Soon After Midnight

Narrow Way

Long and Wasted Years

Pay In Blood

Scarlet Town

Early Roman Kings

Tin Angel

Tempest

Roll On, John

TEMPEST TRACK BY TRACK — ROLL ON, JOHN

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Bob Dylan and John Lennon came into my life within months of each other in the Fall of 1963, when I was 13 years-old.  They changed my life, of course — they changed everything, and I watched that change play out in front of my eyes for the rest of the Sixties.

Lennon was shot and killed by a lunatic in 1980 — it was one of the great cultural tragedies of the 20th Century.  He has been endlessly mourned, and yet . . . I have never really believed in his death.  The music he made with The Beatles, and afterwards, is so immediately joyful, has remained so alive in the culture, that it seems as though he never left this world.

But he did leave this world, and 32 years after he left it, Bob Dylan has written an elegy for him, a eulogy, a lament — a song called “Roll On, John”, which ends Dylan’s album Tempest.  Tempest is a work of art suffused with a sense of loss and tragedy and horror — and hope and defiance and faith, though it pulls no punches.  It admits of no consolations except those that can be received in the ghastly, immediate presence of mortality and sorrow and evil.

Lennon rolls on in Dylan’s song, but not in “music that will never die” or “inspiration that will never die”.  He rolls on in death, beyond death, beyond a grave.  Dylan asks us to cover him over and let him sleep.  To Lennon he says, “Shine your light, move it on” — move it on past this earthly life.

It’s the sweetness of the melody of this song, and the heartbreaking tenderness of Dylan’s vocal, that distinguishes “Roll On, John” from just another tribute, just another celebration of a lost prince.  Dylan seems to be singing this in the presence of Lennon’s corpse.

Dylan does the best singing of his life on Tempest.  His voice is ravaged now, its power and sweetness are gone — he has nothing to rely on but art, subtlety, the slightest inflections of rhythm and breath.  You can learn all you need to know about what singing’s really all about from listening to this album.

It wasn’t until I heard “Roll On, John” that I truly realized that John Lennon was dead — dead, dead, dead — and that the part of him that rolls on is not memory or echo or anything that can be recorded and packaged.  It is light, supernatural light, glimmering very faintly amidst the ruins of a shameful and profane and horrifying world.

Back to the Tempest track list page.

TEMPEST TRACK BY TRACK — TEMPEST

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In the chaos and horror of the sinking of the Titanic, there is a watchman aboard. He’s asleep — dreaming of the disaster befalling him and those he’s charged with watching. “The watchman he lay sleeping, the damage had been done — he dreamed the Titanic was sinking, he tried to tell someone.”

This figure is Dylan, I think — Dylan the prophet. He sees what’s happening to himself and his country and his world, but his vision is like a dream, and that’s all he can testify to. “I had this dream,” he says. “Maybe it’s important — maybe it means something.”

You decide.

Cameron’s film Titanic is one of the most important works of art of our lifetimes.  It looms as large in the culture now as the actual sinking of the actual Titanic.  Dylan’s song is as much about this film as it is about the real ship that sank.  The song is a conversation with the film.

It was a conversation Cameron started, putting lines from Dylan songs into the mouth of Jack, the film’s protagonist.  “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose,” Jack says in the poker game in which he wins his passage on the ship.  “I’m just a tumbleweed, blowin’ in the wind,” he says to Rose.

People criticized Cameron for this, calling the lines anachronistic — though of course the lines were as old as the hills when Dylan used them.  Now, in Dylan’s account of the sinking of the Titanic, he references Cameron’s film repeatedly.

He creates his own climax, however, but it is in many ways the same as Cameron’s climax, in which death and loss are redeemed by sacrifice.  Jim Dandy in Dylan’s narrative smiles ruefully when he realizes that the ship is sinking, because he doesn’t know how to swim.  He has a place in a lifeboat but he gives it to a crippled child — and then when death has its triumph, Jim Dandy’s heart is at peace, untouched by the horror.  He has defeated death by sacrifice, just as Jack does in the film.

What’s left is meditation on the apocalypse — and Dylan gives that to the ship’s captain, facing his end kneeling before the wheel:

In the dark illumination
He remembered bygone years,
Read The Book Of Revelation
And filled his cup with tears.

You will remember that the priest in Cameron’s film quotes from Revelation when the ship goes down:

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Or so the watchman dreamed . . .

Click on the images to enlarge.

Back to the Tempest track list page.