Going Fishing for something with Bob Dylan and Clyde Wrenn

by Kurt Hernon

It was truly a rock and roll sight to behold, in, of course, the most endearing of ways. A battered van-bus with a primer blackened top, hints of school bus yellow peaking out from behind rust, sheet-metal patches, and simple grime sat resting in a mall parking lot and was as obvious as it was visible from the access bridge I was crossing about a mile away. Bob Dylan growled something about "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" as I eased my car into the parking lot and along side the inglorious van. Four ragged figures, clearly born of this beastly vehicle, lingered about restlessly. Dylan, singing the strongest song I’ve heard him sing in years, mused about having "stayed in Mississippi way too long". From the looks of them I get the feeling that Clyde Wrenn and the other three in this band, Michael Minori, Chris Kirshbaum, and Phil Cobb, would nod in agreement to Dylan’s lament. They are three thousand miles from home and only three days into a tour of the northeastern United States that will take them from Columbus, Ohio to North Carolina to New York City to Buffalo, New York and then back to Ohio for stops in Dayton and Cincinnati - and they already have that "way too long" look that Dylan was singing about.

I’d been wrestling with Dylan and his acclaimed new record Love and Theft for a week or so before I’d known that Wrenn, who over time, as these things turn in our internet era, had become a good friend whom I’d never met, and his band of merrymakers would be in and around my home turf. After scores of listens I really hadn’t heard much in the way of revelations from Sir Bob’s new record and was starting to feel taken once again by the rote platitudes of deity that seem to pop their nervous little heads out of holes in the cultural landscape every time Dylan sings. At first listen it quickly became clear that Love and Theft was going to be a "good" Dylan record as it was a welcome turn away from the soft, lifeless Daniel Lanois production that muddled its gloomy predecessor Time Out of Mind and moved Dylan back toward the traditional folk blues combo based music that had originally defined the man. But to define a Dylan work as merely "good" carries the unfortunate and ultimately distinct implication of it actually being, in a relative sense, "bad" or quite simply a disappointment, because the very nature of Dylan’s largesse – his insurmountable pop culture and music legend – is such that by now other people are capable of making a "good" Bob Dylan record, but Dylan himself can only make and meet the lofty peaks of Highway 61 Revisited, or Blonde on Blonde, or Freewheelin’ - anything less is a let down.

Love and Theft is swollen, hell it’s completely bloated with "good" songs that are clearly far from great, but certainly exquisitely professional and a welcome return to a more righteously Dylan-esque earthiness. So I’d have to guess – because I sure don’t hear any of it - that all the hubbub around this record is pretty much because it finally brings Dylan back from the cold and overproduced Lanois crypt and back into simple, decent, and honorable acoustic tin pan arrangements and sensibilities. Hip hip hooray and a yawn.

Yet it also isn’t surprising that Dylan is still quite capable of adding to his cannon of exceptional songs. Love and Theft’s one truly overwhelming moment is the song "Mississippi", a tune that preys on the simple pop lessons learned from doing time with Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne whilst a Wilbury. It is the best piece of honest-to-God Dylan-age on this record, and may be the finest since Empire Burlesque’s "Dark Eyes" and "Emotionally Yours" (come to think of it, Empire is a better, more graceful record than Love and Theft throughout). But the fact of this matter is that "Mississippi" is so good that it sets aside your reservations and haunts you until you’re willing to let the rest of the record slide – if only because you’re astonished that Dylan actually pulls such a coup off, if even for only one song, after all these years. And so I to, for a brief moment, will let Love and Theft slide with a recommendation that you find some way to hear "Mississippi", whether it be through dropping cash on this "good" Dylan record (again, not a bad deal all in all, but a Tom Waits record would probably be the more honest and refreshing tin pan experience), or by listening to a friend’s, or the library’s, or online, whatever it takes because this song is Bob Dylan today.

But Dylan wasn’t on my mind as I rolled into the parking lot and ambled up beside that bus, his new music just isn’t able to carry the sort of weight that tugs at a mind these days, at least it isn’t directly. What I was thinking about, the nudging sitting at the frayed edges of my mind, particularly in the aftermath of what occurred only a few days before at the World Trade Center buildings in New York, was something called "Sawdust in the Mash", a haunting, gorgeous, and ethereal song by Clyde Wrenn from his new The Blue Cliff Record. I’d singled the song out before in reviews of the disc when it was released but that could hardly appease and/or eradicate the songs lingering and lasting effects. It was still in my blood, it had stayed with me – and feels as though it might always. I’d already listened to it a hundred times or more, and I’d been hearing it in echoes another hundred times or so in my head. And now, with the world in a seeming twisted mess of concrete and steel, I found myself coming back to it, seeking its odd kind of solace.

It’s a strange song on which to lean for consolation because it isn’t a happy tune by any means. But happy isn’t what these blues or any blues are for, whether they be significantly traditional or not. "Sawdust in the Mash" weeps. It’s a mournful dirge, a slow sorrowful, soulful march, fluttering along in the breezes of Jonathon Segel’s divine violin work as Wrenn’s poetically oblique lyrics defy logic in their address of life and love, all of its inherent glory, its angers, joys, hatreds, and frustrations, all gutted in a confused and frightened voice, one from which most of us can rarely speak let alone sing. It’s the most inconsolable kind of war, and Wrenn’s voice is his weapon. His voice is the reason that the depths of such a despairing tune can carry tranquility, can shine light into the corners of darkness and ultimately reveal something beautiful. The simple ghostly beauty of Wrenn’s voice weaves through "Sawdust in the Mash" as frighteningly emotional manifest poetry.

"Man," Wrenn says while mulling over a lunch of French fries and chicken sandwich. "Dylan has written what, like thirty of the greatest songs ever?" The band is an amiable bunch and discussion around the table bounces around and ultimately winds up at Bob Dylan’s new record. "Why doesn’t he just take it easy and go fishing or something?" Kirshbaum asks what the record sounds like. I tell him it sounds like what Tom Waits has always been doing, but that Waits does it better. It’s as abrupt and as honest an off the cuff assessment as I could come up with and I realize that after a week of struggling to put the record in some sort of order in my own mind that it really is that simple. Aside from "Mississippi" Love and Theft is a decent, rootsy rock record that has been done better by others (Elvis Costello’s King of America stands out as the most obvious), but…BUT, "Mississippi" is so good that it smudges its imprint across the entire record. It’s Dylan’s one big statement on this disc, and he fire’s it off early like prizefighter delivering a near deadly second round blow early and then resorting to his experience, his finesse, and his wits to dance all the way toward the final bell. And he knows the crowd is on his side. Give ‘em a bit of the old one-two and then placate ‘em. Laurels are a damn fine thing to rest upon, especially when the people love you so much.

It seems as though, brothers and sisters, we may have lost our way. Our intentions have certainly remained true and our passions have never been less than steadfast, yet in the rush to seek higher meaning, in the hurry-scurry to proclaim greatness, and in the mad, reckless dash for a certain kind of sonic Valhalla we have callously forgotten the very cornerstone of our faith – Song. And although we may wander the dark valley of fashion’s deceit, and whoa we may stumble along the self-righteous path of analytical dissection, it is we who pour greater and greater meaning into things essentially meaningless. When we do this we find ourselves settling for the hollow satisfaction of assessing the ‘value’ of art and we all become the victims of self-perpetuated crimes against the one thing that matters most – song itself.

This is the second time this month that I have used this premise as part of a piece. The first time was a monthly column I do at another web site wherein I mocked myself for being too bombastic with such stylistic hogwash. After writing that column I found myself in a sort of dilemma – as I reread the preamble above I discovered that I actually liked the premise. And then after reading it a few more times I came to the stark realization that I also truly believed what it says. With that I was able to rearrange my thinking a little bit and discovered myself with a relatively new-to-me non-critical vantage point from whence I began to listen for things small, things far less glorious than the spectacular. And strangely enough I sought satisfaction in a song, one song at a time, and for the first time in a long time one song would be more than enough.

With my calloused critical skin shed I allowed myself to seek and find the slightest of pleasures, to listen to and embrace good works on their own merits, and to assess songs as autonomous. That said, if the only thing Clyde Wrenn ever sang again, or ever had sung, was "Sawdust in the Mash", or if "Mississippi" were the final words, the last, eternal voice of a legend like Bob Dylan, I would have no complaints. Because, when all is said and done, these two utterly beautiful and transcendent songs are ultimately far greater than any whole they could ever be a part of and are more than any of us should demand, or even expect, in these great Days of Fear. For, at its core, music is song, and songs are the conjured tangible monuments to the dreams that men and women will forever dream.  I’ll take "Sawdust" and "Mississippi", how about you?

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