From the Top of the Hill:
An early "study guide" to Modern Times and "Cross the Green Mountain

by Adam Selzer

Other Dylan writings

One thing I do a lot of lately is talk about how Dylan's writing style is like Shakespeare's - they both have this thing where the writing goes beyond just the words and what they mean - there's this whole other layer about the way the sounds of the words bounce off each other, the way the rhymes relate to one another, the rhythm of the words and the structures and so forth. Stuff that no one can do consciously - if you tried, it'd come off as a mess. Most of the best writers we've produced (Joyce, etc) can do this, but few do it without making something that few outside of the most devoted English students will enjoy. And when Dylan sings his songs, he can bring that quality out in a way that no one else can - and Joyce, who is too busy being dead to give a lot of readings, can't bring out that quality in his own work. We only have bits and pieces of info about what Shakespeare was like as a performer, and most of that is in the form of unreliable third hand anecdotes, but I suspect he was a bit like Dylan - erratic, not to all tastes, but occasionally transcendent. A wrier like Dylan doesn't come around every decade. One who is also a great performer is even rarer.

Anyway, on to how this new record is. I suspect that, if I'm going along with this whole Shakespeare thing, that it'll be like, say, "Henry IV." It doesn't usually get listed among the "greatest hits," like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, or the other more famous ones, but it has its defenders. Modern Times won't usually get lumped in with Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde by future generation, but not because is isn't a great work, and those who do dip their toes in will be well rewarded for it. It's simply not Dylan's easiest album to approach - it's often dark, disturbing, violent, and brooding. Other than a western swing dance number or two, it's not really made for grooving. It will probably sound better in winter than it does in summer. All I can do with this review is point out what I'm hearing, noticing, wondering about on the first few plays. For everything else, it's too soon to tell. it's far too soon, and too complicated a work, to assign a star rating to it already. To assume that we've even identified all of the major themes, to assume that we know all about the songs before we've heard many of the different incarnations that they'll inevitably take on in concert over the years. But there's no reason not to dangle my feet in the water while it's still fresh.

What we have here is not only Dylan's most violent album, but also perhaps his most lusty. Everywhere, he's going off to war, recovering from war, and thinking about women - sometimes in more wholesome ways than others. In many of the best songs, he's doing both.

A lot of times, we're left wondering who (or what) the narrator is, exactly, and what kind of world he comes from. I'm leaning towards the idea that the songs take place in the same sort of dimension as Masked and Anonymous - they're contemporary, more or less, but in a version of our modern times where Robert E. Lee never gave the word that the civil war was not to be a guerilla war, and it did, in fact, last to this day, as Bob says it would have in Chronicles. Or maybe the civil war going on is a whole new one, or maybe no one's sure if it's still the same war or not.

We have songs of going to war, and post-war songs - in the second half of the record, they even sort of follow a narrative structure. He goes off to war in "Workingman's Blues #2", deals with losing the battle and sets out of to travel in "Nettie Moore," and in "Ain't Talkin'" he's still out traveling, a little less sane for wear. But we're missing a song about the war itself - unless we count "Cross the Green Mountain," which came out a few years earlier on the "God and Generals" soundtrack. We can assume that it was a civil war song, mostly due to the fact that it was written for a civil war movie and the video showed Dylan and the band in civil war garb, but, divorced from that, it could really be any war, or any alternate history version of the civil war. Stick it in with another blues song (for pacing) after "Workingman's Blues," or "Beyond the Horizon," and it would fit in, both musically and in narrative terms, perfectly. In fact, it would very nearly tie the whole album together, bringing in songs that normally seem outside of the thing, or like filler - the lyrics to "Cross the Green Mountain" have references to ancient light (see "When the Deal Goes Down"), music coming from somewhere else (see "Thunder on the Mountain), the top of the hill (see "Nettie Moore"), and altars burning (see "Ain't Talkin"). I liked "Green Mountain" when it came out, but hearing it in the context of these songs makes it almost indescribably more powerful to me. It used to sound like a very good song. Now it sounds like a masterpiece. Context steers the way we view and experience art, all right.

So some of the songs come from the point of view of a person fighting in the war, and maybe some of the other songs are the songs this guy hears in the night clubs and honkey tonks on the long journey between battles or on the long journey home (I'm not saying this definitively, of course, but it's turned out to be a pretty solid way to approach the album as a whole). Now, all this isn't to "excuse" the blues and swing songs, but one does have to wonder, at least initially, if they were necessary. "Someday Baby," "Rollin and Tumblin," etc don't really break any new ground, exactly, and, though they certainly do an excellent job in keeping the pace of the album rolling smoothly, it's hard not to say "do we really need any more Dylan blues songs?" Well, not necessarily. But, on the other hand, it's hard to imagine that there could ever be too many of them, and, anyway, they're very good blues songs - if someone had dug them up on a long-lost Howlin' Wolf session, they'd probably be thought of as astonishing. I suppose we might as well ask if we needed one more history play by Shakespeare, or one more mistaken identity comedy - we don't, really, but one day we'll be glad to have them around.

Now, all of the above speculation about Civil War undercurrents were written BEFORE it came to light that a lot of the songs (plus Cross the Green Mountain) contained lines from Henry Timrod, a civil war poet. I admit that I was annoyed to find this out – not because Dylan had done anything wrong, but because it would give easy ammo to people who didn’t know the difference between plagiarism and intertextuality and were looking for mud to sling.

Rhyming “frailer than flowers” with “these precious hours,” or saying “sleep is like a temporary death” are no more plagiarism than Dylan quoting Pope on “fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” or, for that matter, Sting cribbing a line from Christopher Marlowe in “Fields of Gold.” If this is plagiarism, so are most of the scriptural references and Shakespeare quotes that dot Dylan’s songs – and those of countless other songwriters. The main difference is that most people aren’t as familiar with the Timrod stuff.

What’s most interesting, therefore, is that it may indicate that, in Dylan’s mind or worldview, Timrod is just as well-known or important as Shakespeare – certainly he doesn’t seem to feel that quoting him is any different than quoting any of the other people who are quoted over and over. And it gives us a strong indication of the extent to which Dylan interest in the civil war. Earlier on, I was fascinated by trying to figure out exactly what kind of a world the songs were meant to exist in – the presence of the Timrod lines is a pretty strong clue.

Anyway, on to the song by song:

THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN
I didn't get into this much at first - I skipped it the first few times through the album as a whole. Then, listening to it with the rest of the album as a point of reference, it seemed like a whole new song, a rollicking start. Here we establish the main themes of the album - impending warfare and doom, lust, and the "outsider on the fringes" persona that keeps coming back, getting ready to raise him an army and get him a woman. We also get the main clue - the Alicia Keyes reference - to tell us that this, despite the obvious civil war parallels,is all contemporary, not strictly a period piece, and, in the last verse, we even get a foreshadowing of "Workingman's Blues #2" - his pitchfork (his cruel weapon) is on the shelf, and he's planning to go be a working man, planting and harvesting. A smiling start to a not-so-smiley album.

SPIRIT ON THE WATER
This is the first one where I really wonder WHAT exactly the narrator is supposed to be - something that's been to Paradise, that sees spirits on the water. There's a hint that he might be a ghost - or maybe the girl to whom he's singing is - assuming it's a girl, not some spiritual entity. And if the girl is a spirit on the water, why is he traveling by land, exactly? Certainly the riff and the mood of the song calls to mind a good-natured ethereal being of some sort, drifting along. It's possible to say that this song sort of goes on to long - I imagine that some of the verses will be dropped when the song is played live, without many people missing them - but, on the other hand, the song casts a sort of a lazy spell of its own that's hard to let go of. And the ending - the GREAT last two verses and the harp solo - is worth the wait. A word on the last two verses: most of this song, for a good five minutes, seems like an odd little love song, with occasional forays into the "weird," (the ghost verse, etc). Then, at the end, we get a pleasant "I wish I were with you in paradise" bit, followed, out of left field, with the hilarious "I can't go back to paradise / I killed a man back there," then a "you think I'm past my prime? let me see what you got." There are a lot of "c'mon, show me your stuff, if you're so hot" type challenges in this record.
Fast forward to a few months later, and one purpose of the song becomes clear: the song provides almost limitless opportunities for Dylan to have fun with phrasing. The vocals can be sung any number of ways without having to re-arrange the song or the meaning of the song very much at all. Listening to him sing it live, one can even get the impression that he wrote it strictly to play around with the vocals onstage – and he could probably predict that the audience would respond vocally to the “think I’m over the hill” lines.

ROLLIN AND TUMBLIN
Just Another Blues Song, maybe, but a fun one. I love that he uses "I woke up this morning" as the LAST line of the song. But, while mostly a "woman done me wrong" song, there's still all of this apocalyptic stuff to compliment it - early doom, long dead souls being conjured from the tomb (see also: "frankie's in the graveyard, albert's raising hell" in "Nettie Moore"), and the returning rising sun that will make some people burn (which, of course, brings us back to the Sun/Son stuff we debated over in Not Dark Yet).

WHEN THE DEAL GOES DOWN
Maybe the most puzzling song of them all - midway between a Rudy Vallee crooning vehicle and church hymn, and might seem like a fairly sappy (if rather verbose) love song, except for that weird chorus line, which begs one question in particular: what deal? The one Robert Johnson spoke of comes to mind, of course. Presumably it's something to do with the end of the world, at least as we know it, but then again, who knows?
"Make You Feel My Love," like the similar "You Belong To Me," was a straight up love song which the sick among us might have perceived as having a certain darkness underneath the surface. The chorus of this one points a little more plainly at the darkness, and, at the end we have deafening noise by the stream (a la "Cross the Green Mountain"). Few writers could do a love song this foreboding without there being something of a theatrical grin behind the whole thing. Guys like Nick Cave write "evil" love songs a lot, but you can tell that they're smiling about it the whole time. Dylan plays it straight here.
D-minus for grammer on the more "more frailer than flowers" line, though.
Anyone else hear a saxophone somewhere buried in the mix? I can certainly imagine there being one here.

SOMEDAY BABY
Just Another Blues Song, but more sinister. Lots of great lines in here, and looks as though it may be released as a single, since there's apparently a radio edit out there. While it's not the most striking song here, I do think it would make a good single - it's a solid, very well-written blues song, catchy enough for the airwaves, and it if seems easy to bash, that's mainly because it doesn't break new ground, doesn't seem to have any loftier aspirations that just to be a blues song, and only has much to do with the rest of the album due to all of the violence in the song - threats to wring necks and drive people from their homes, even though he loves the person he's singing to (to his chagrin).
So who's he singing to - a woman? Cigarettes or some other bad habit? Money, even? There are some lines that match up to the theory that he's singing to some sort of addiction, not just a person. in fact, the more I listen to it, the less it sounds like he's singing to a woman - or, if he he is, he's using the woman to represent something else, or just personifying the addiction somehow.
Another phantom instrument - I keep thinking I hear a violin wailing away in the back, but I'm not sure.

WORKINGMAN'S BLUES #2
Kicking off what I guess would be side 2 - a rather darker side than the already dark side 1, and starting off what seems like more a continual narrative, here's a song in a very unusual (for Dylan) ABAB rhyming scheme, in which our hero sets off to fight - something he's spoken about doing a couple of times in earlier songs. We've already established that something bad is going down, that he's raising an army, and that he's been driven from his home.
This is a major composition, and one that Dylan clearly put some thought into (you just don't write this long of a piece in ABAB without putting some thought into it). A line I keep coming back to is "my cruel weapons have been put on the shelf / come and sit down on my knee," since it suggests so much backstory about the guy and the girl to whom he's singing. She's had reason, in the past, to be afraid of him (hardly surprising, given all of the threats of violence in earlier songs on the album), but no more. It's time to focus on the big things now.
I'm sticking to my earlier theory that the "new path that we trod" is a reference to "I Ain't Got No Home," in which the narrator (who, notably, calls himself a "working man") mentions that his is a "path that a million feet have trod." Dylan's working man might remember a time when the working man was treading a new, better path, one that's just a sweet memory now that the buying power of the proletariate has gone down.
A brief word on the proletarian angle - plenty of people will point out that, whatever else he may be, he himself certainly isn't part of the proletariat. But A: that doesn't mean the narrator isn't, and B: certainly doesn't mean that Dylan isn't a working man. He's said many times that he looks at what he does as a trade, and, while his is a very well paid job that many of us would prefer to our own, what Dylan does is a job, and not an easy one, at that.
One person suggested to me that the “you” in the song might be America itself, which is a fascinating way to look at it.

BEYOND THE HORIZON
Beyond the Horizon it's easy to love - which, naturally, means that here before the horizon, it's hard. Going back to that Rudy Vallee feeling that we got a little earlier, maybe this is the radio hit of the day in that alternate reality where the old war is still going on - it has a lot in common with "Some Sunny Day," a hit from a previous war. It's a love song, but once again, it's love in the midst of something sinister, of fire and flames. It's dark, it's dreary, and he's wounded and weary. Someone's life has been spared for some unknown reason. If we're taking this as a song about the war the guy sets off for in WB#2, (and I'm not saying it is, necessarily), the general feeling here is that things didn't go well, and there's a hint ("Someone prayed for your soul") that the "you" in the song has died. It's a pretty song, but all the pretty things in it only exist beyond the horizon - not where the singer is at the moment.

If we're taking my idea that there's an overall narrative structure here for granted, right about here is where we're missing the song about the fighting itself. And, as I mentioned, I think "Cross the Green Mountain" would fit perfectly here - it covers the narrative (more explicitly than the hints in "Beyond the Horizon,"and fits in well musically, too. If I were slipping it in on "Modern Times Mix," as we've all surely done with Infidels, I'd put it right here, followed by Tell Ol' Bill for pacing purposes, though I'll be waiting for Huck's Tune with great interest.)

NETTIE MOORE
So, if my hunch is right, this may be the sequel to "Workingman's Blues #2" - is Nettie the person he was singing to before? And is she dead now, perhaps? There are hints that she died in Beyond the Horizon, and he predicted that she'd be laid low a couple of songs back. Or is she just out there somewhere, waiting beyond the horizon?
Here, our hero has finished the fighting, at least for now, and, from the sound of it, came out a little worse for wear, a long, long way from home. You don't get the sense that his side won the fight - the blues are coming down like hail, the world has gone black, and something's out of whack. And, though he's in love with Nettie Moore (the "you" in the song, of course), and will come back to her when he's done traveling, there's another woman in the song, his baby who cooks all day, bringing in the menage a trois element that's come up in so many Dylan songs over the years. Or maybe the woman who cooks all night is the same "woman as symbol" from back in "Someday Baby."
I worried, initially, that this song wouldn’t work out live – the arrangement is very delicate, and the wrong kind of organ playing could really ruin things. It also seemed like an easy song for Dylan to slip into lazy vocals, upsinging, etc. Boy, oh boy, was I ever wrong about that. The organ sound and the violin make for an especially rich, lush arrangement, and, on the versions that were played on the fall tour, the vocals were top-notch. During the two performances I saw myself (East Rutherford and Philadelphia), even the rich jerks who talked through every song they didn’t know sat still for this one. All the same vocal opportunities as “Spirit on the Water,” with a lot more emotional impact.

THE LEVEE'S GONNA BREAK
lyrically, kinda continues the "not ready to go back" theme. In terms of pacing, it may be the most important song - following Nettie with Ain't Talkin would be a whole lot of bleak - in the middle here, we have an uptempo song that hints more at redemption - throwing away ones clothes, jumping in the river, and being as good as new. Salvation could be behind the corner. One big question: is he saying "you say you want me to quit you," or is it " you say 'you want me to quit you?' " And, in the midst of this, MORE apocalyptic images of flood and fleeing. Thinking of Katrina is hard not to do The levee's gonna break, and some people are still sleeping, suggesting that, though the war between the proletariate and the bourgeouise is still going on (or already over), some people are still not seeing it. Probably the least compelling song to me (at least right now), but its use in terms of pacing is obvious. The rougher version played live at the last two shows of the fall tour are a definite improvement over the album version.

AIN'T TALKIN
And now we pick up our wounded hero again - still traveling the world, as he planned to do in Nettie Moore. The fight's not over yet, and he can't get away. He's quite possibly going a bit crazy here, hence the line about the toothache in his heal, which identifies him with Old Dan Tucker (who was more of a "funny" crazy), and still thinking about the girl he left behind. Maybe it's Nettie, maybe it's the other girl, but, whichever, he doesn't seem to think he'll be making it back to her anymore. He's already gotten as far as the world's end, and there are still enemies to slaughter, still deaths to avenge. Still people out there who will crush you with wealth and power. A lot of work left to do.

One person also suggested to me that the speaker in the song may be in Iraq – which, according to people who are into Biblical archaeology, would have been the location of the Garden of Eden. Makes sense to me.

My hunch is that considering this seeing this as the third album in a trilogy (with "Time Out of Mind" and "Love and Theft") is more the record company talking than Dylan, but it works - it makes perfect sense for a trilogy that opens with "I'm walkin' through streets that are dead," to be book-ended with "ain't talkin, just walkin." Walking is a theme that turns up over and over again in all three albums.

So I started to write this as a review, but ended up with something more like an early study guide - one that's nowhere near complete - or, perhaps, as a brain-dump for all the words that fill my head and need to fall to the floor before I can start to sort them out. All of this, of course, leaves out a lot. What about all the references to blindness? All of the things about between the contrast between night and day (including the stunning "The sun is strong, I'm standing in the light / I wish to G-d that it were night" ), which is also all over the last two records.

So that's my theory - or, any way, my approach to the album as a whole piece of work. There's a bit of a narrative structure, one which may be at least partially intentional. I'm not saying Bob was sitting around in the studio saying "hey, play a little march thing between verses on Horizon, so people remember that this is a song dealing with an army," but looking at them from that angle - the Masked and Anonymous Civil War reality angle - is one way to look at it. The next guy to post something may see something totally different, and I could end up writing an equally long review that doesn't mention any of this stuff. That's one of the great things about Dylan - like Shakespeare, they just keep working.