From the Head of the Mule

Like Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft” (the quotation marks are part of the title, which is borrowed from a book by Eric Lott on blackface minstrelsy) seems to exist in a patchwork past, in a landscape out of Joel Chandler Harris by way of Flannery O’Conner. I think of it also as a kind of down-home The Waste Land, set in American cadences and stitched from bits of old folk songs and blues, Tin Pan Alley tunes, the Bible, and other works of literature and myth, from Virgil to F. Scott Fitzgerald, with cameos by the real people of history -- though, unlike Eliot, Dylan leaves the footnoting to the fans. The meanings of these juxtapositions can‘t always be parsed, if meanings there are; but even as they slip away they create a picture. They mean what they say, even when they don’t say anything.

“Old, young -- age don‘t carry weightIt doesn’t matter in the end,” Dylan sings here, but the curious nature of permanent pop culture means that all his younger selves are simultaneously available for review, and inevitably suggest the irreversible flight of time‘s arrow. Yet he has achieved a point of integration now, where all those earlier selves collaborate -- “Love and Theft” is of a piece with Bringing It All Back Home and John Wesley Harding without aping them -- and somehow he does seem younger than ever. “You’re a worn-out star” the girls all say, as he drives in the flats in his Cadillac car, but he‘s in fighting shape, considering, and duded up with a rakish pencil-thin mustache that looks as if it might have actually been penciled on. (And if I read the reference right -- “I’m staying with Aunt SallyBut, you know, she‘s not really my aunt” -- he’s also, if only for a couplet, Huck Finn, the great American boy and free spirit.) He‘s ready to go. There’s always some new costume to try on, some new way to sing an old song. He not busy being born is busy dying. (Bob Dylan said that.)