https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/7ce7 ... 37394b5b87
Bob Dylan: the 66 songs that made me — from Elvis Costello to the Who
Read our exclusive extracts of the Nobel laureate’s new book The Philosophy of Modern Song and his verdict on Britain’s Buddy Holly, Bobby Darin and a motley crew of greats
ucked away among the 66 songs Bob Dylan analyses in his riveting new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, lie three surprises. Writing for the most part about American music of the recent and distant past, he suddenly turns his gaze to Britain.
His first choice is Elvis Costello’s blistering 1978 single Pump It Up — a telling one in that Costello has long acknowledged the song’s debt to Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues. His next stop is a track from the decade that defines him. In the Who’s My Generation (1965) and its key line “Hope I die before I get old”, Dylan, now 81, rightly detects a deep dread of the fate that awaits us all: today’s rebel is tomorrow’s crusty curmudgeon. “That fear”, he writes, “is perhaps the most honest thing about the song. We all rail at the previous generation but somehow know it’s only a matter of time until we will become them ourselves.
Dylan returns to the Seventies for his third Brit pick. The title track from the Clash’s 1979 album, London Calling, rages against the past as furiously as My Generation does the present and future (“Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust”).
Picking two songs from the British punk and new wave scene in the late Seventies may raise an eyebrow. This is the period, after all, when Dylan, raised in an observant Jewish family, converted to evangelical Christianity. His antennae somehow simultaneously picked up the anger-fuelled agit-pop that was transforming British music at the time. Should that come as a surprise? Not to those who listened to Theme Time Radio Hour, his zanily archival radio show that ran from 2006-09. Or those who have followed his current world tour. At his first London show at the Palladium, he referred to John Lennon’s famous remark at the same venue, during the Beatles’ Royal Variety Performance in 1963. “Is this the place”, he inquired, “where you clap your hands and rattle your jewellery?”
The Philosophy of Modern Song is Dylan’s first published work since he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2016. It follows the (loosely) autobiographical Chronicles Volume One (2004), a work that was pored over by legions of Dylanologists, desperate for revelation, confession and explanation. Dylan’s new book will be just as forensically sifted for clues. Here are three exclusive extracts.
Britain’s Buddy Holly
Bob Dylan delivers his verdict on Elvis Costello
Elvis is one of those guys whose fans fall somewhere between the two poles of passion and precision. There are people who tick off the boxes of his life with the same obsession of someone completing a train schedule while others don’t know anything beyond the fact that he sings a song that accompanied a particularly devastating break-up. Very seldom a cheery wedding song but plenty of break-up songs.
Knowing a singer’s life story doesn’t particularly help your understanding of a song. Frank Sinatra’s feelings over Ava Gardner allegedly inform I’m a Fool to Want You, but that’s just trivia. It’s what a song makes you feel about your own life that’s important.
Elvis Costello and the Attractions were a better band than any of their contemporaries. Light years better. Elvis himself was a unique figure. Horn-rimmed glasses, quirky, pigeon-toed and intense. The only singer-guitarist in the band. You couldn’t say that he didn’t remind you of Buddy Holly. The Buddy stereotype. At least on the surface. Elvis had Harold Lloyd in his DNA as well. At the point of Pump It Up, he obviously had been listening to Springsteen too much. But he also had a heavy dose of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Pump It Up is a quasi stop-time tune with powerful rhetoric and, with all this, Elvis exuded nothing but high-level belligerence. He was belligerent in every way. Even down to the look in his eyes. A typical Englishman or Irishman, it didn’t matter how much squalor he was living in, he always appeared in a suit and a tie.
Back then English people appeared in suits and ties no matter how poor they were. With this manner of dress every Englishman was equal. Unlike in the States, where people wore blue jeans and work boots and any type of attire, projecting conspicuous inequality. The Brits, if nothing else, had dignity and pride and they didn’t dress like bums. Money or no money. The dress code equalised one and all in old Britain.
Pump It Up is intense and as well groomed as can be. With tender hooks and dirty looks, heaven-sent propaganda and slander that you wouldn’t understand. Torture her and talk to her, bought for her, temperature, was a rhyming scheme long before Biggie Smalls or Jay-Z. Submission and transmission, pressure pin and other sin, just rattled through this song. It’s relentless, as all of his songs from this period are. Trouble is, he exhausted people. Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves. Here, however, it’s all compacted into one long song. Elvis is hard edged with that belligerence that somehow he is able to streamline into his work. The songs are at top speed and this is among his very best. In time Elvis would prove he had a gigantic musical soul. Too big for this type of aggressive music to contain. He went all over the place and it was hard for an audience to get a fix on him.
From here he went on to play chamber music, write songs with Burt Bacharach, do country records, cover records, soul records, ballet and orchestral music. When you are writing songs with Burt Bacharach, you obviously don’t give a f*** what people think. Elvis blows through all kinds of genres like they are not even there. Pump It Up is what gives him a licence to do all these things.
Pump It Up
Elvis Costello
This Year’s Model (Radar, 1978)
This song speaks new speak. It’s the song you sing when you’ve reached the boiling point. Tense and uneasy, comes with a discount — with a lot of give-away stuff. And you’re going to extend that stuff till it ruptures and splits into a million pieces. You never look back you look forward, you’ve had a classical education, and some on the job training. You’ve learnt to look into every loathsome nauseating face and expect nothing.
You live in a world of romance and rubble, and you roam the streets at all hours of the night. You’ve acquired things and brought people the goods.
It’s not like you have a promising future. You’re the alienated hero who’s been taken for a ride by a quick-witted little hellcat, the hot-blooded sex-starved wench that you depended on so much, who failed you. You thought she was heaven and life everlasting, but she was just strong-willed and determined — turned you into a synthetic and unscrupulous person. Now you’ve come to the place where you’re going to blow things up, puncture it, shoot it down.
This song is in full swing. The one-two punch, the uppercut, and the wallop, then get out quick and make tracks. You broke the commandments and cheated. Now you’ll have to back down, capitulate and turn in your resignation.
What is it about you anyway? You want to boost everything up, exaggerate it, until you can grip it and fondle it.
Why does it all seem so crooked and hush hush?
Why all the trivial talk and yakety yak?
Why all the monotonous and lifeless music that plays inside your head?
And what about that little she goat that won’t go away? You want to maim and mangle her. You want to see her in agony, and you want to blow this whole thing up until it’s swollen, where you’ll run your hands all over and squeeze it till it collapses.
This song is brainwashed, and comes to you with a lowdown dirty look, exaggerates and amplifies itself until you can flesh it out, and it suits your mood. This song has a lot of defects, but it knows how to conceal them all.
(…)
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.