Desire, And What It Leads To

Desire was the breakthrough Dylan album for me. Before it I'd admired Dylan, but from quite a distance, and part of me didn't quite get a lot of what he did. Sometimes the voice simply sounded comic, sometimes the music seemed though not exactly inept not quite 'ept' somehow. I hasten to add that at the time of the release of Desire there was an awful lot of Dylan I'd never listened to. In those days album costs were prohibitive for someone of my income (virtually nil really) so buying one was a big event and I never felt I could afford to experiment in terms of sampling new stuff. Even borrowing an album seemed a big deal. I remember getting hold of John Wesley Harding at school and just not appreciating it at all, thus pretty much deciding not to bother with other stuff from the catalogue. In fact, I realise now I was always a long way behind others in grasping the work of musicians who came to prominence in the late sixties. I don't think I actually listened to Sgt Pepper's until around 1970 - 71.

But Desire spoke to me, at the time of its release, in a big way Someone, I can't remember who, had bought it at university and for a few weeks it became the album played late at night on those nights when conversation got out of hand and supplanted the good sense of sleep. It insinuated itself musically into my brain until I became hooked on just about everything involved in its distinctive sound world: the hooky melodies, the echoey but oh-so-right drums and bass, the resinous violin sound, those oddly complimentary voices - Dylan's abrasive, Emmylou's sweet but sometimes just on the edge of struggling to find a tune. Then I delved into the lyrics, and found myself beguiled. The personal songs, full of emotion yet strange and indirect so you had to guess at contexts and meanings, and ended up supplying them. I constructed an entire narrative around One More Cup Of Coffee which I never really believed had much to do with what Dylan meant but which I found satisfying. The theatrical songs, narratives that drew you in to their implausible and never wholly serious worlds and seemed to say something worth saying, or, rather, involved you in something worth feeling.

Today I was listening to Desire once again, in the car and was struck by how much I liked the track Joey, almost universally panned by critics over the years as a glorification of a gangster who didn't deserve the tribute. Moralising over Dylan's songs misses the point (sometimes, though possibly not in the case of those songs which genuinely involve a 'message' of some kind). In this case you just need to surrender to the laconic machismo on offer and become a less than self-aware, sentimental mafioso of the old school for as long as the song lasts. It's not a nice thing to do but Dylan is prepared to put less than comfortable things on offer. That's what this album helped me understand back then and why it opened for me a new way of listening.