Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, 1963
Bob Dylan is bored in quarantine. And luckily for us, he has released a couple of new tracks, Murder Most Foul and I Contain Multitudes. They must have been recorded in the sessions for his 2012 album Tempest, the last original music he produced before embarking on his Sinatra songbook project.
They are both delivered in a declamatory tone – quite similar to his presenting style in his wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour, one-hour long radio shows which he broadcasted from 2006 to 2009. He picks a theme like the weather and then selects songs that straightforwardly chime with it – i.e. Dean Martin’s I don’t care if the sun don’t shine.
It got me thinking about Dylan’s changes in voice over the decades. Screaming rocker, proto-rapper in Subterranean Homesick Blues, country crooner – it’s all there. This Radio Reaction is a prose poem titled Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie that Dylan wrote in the early sixties dedicated to Guthrie, the folk troubadour who he saw as his great hero.
Dylan spins through the early stanzas in rapid time – giving a picture of the nervous young artist, driven by obsession and feelings of inadequacy. Everything is out of joint – things are all wrong, city life a “bubble-gum craze”. “That stuff ain’t real,” he says.
He advertises “hope” as a route out of it all, a word he repeats over and over again with various different images, a lamp, candle and an oil well. At last he finds it for “real” in Woody Guthrie’s music.
Listening to Woody is like being at “Grand Canyon at sundown,” he concludes. Various themes explored in Last Thoughts appear throughout Dylan’s career – his uncanny ability, for example, to situate his voice and its influences at the beating heart of the American experience and its wide expanses.
There’s also a real intimacy to the track – he was a young man and really sounds it. No rough house rasping here. In his early albums, he sounds like a gnarled old stager, a self-conscious aping of the older “dustbowl” generation of folk singers like Guthrie. Here, he just sounds like, well, Bob!
