"Love and Theft"
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| "Love and Theft" | ||
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| Studio album by Bob Dylan | ||
| Released | September 11, 2001 | |
| Recorded | May 2001 | |
| Genre | Folk/Rock | |
| Length | 57:25 | |
| Label | Columbia | |
| Producer(s) | Bob Dylan (as Jack Frost) | |
| Professional reviews | ||
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| Bob Dylan chronology | ||
| The Essential Bob Dylan (2000) |
"Love and Theft" (2001) |
The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 (2002) |
"Love and Theft" is the 31st studio album by Bob Dylan, released in 2001 by Sony BMG.
The album continued Dylan's artistic comeback following 1997's Time out of Mind, and was given an even more enthusiastic reception. Critics likened the lively and often humorous songs to The Basement Tapes,[citation needed] a marked departure from the somber themes of its predecessor. It gave Dylan his best trans-Atlantic chart showings in over two decades, going gold in the US and peaking at #5 on the Billboard charts (#3 in the United Kingdom).[citation needed] It won the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Folk Album and was nominated for Album of the Year.[citation needed]
Musically, it samples several pre-rock genres, mainly the blues. Dylan produced the album himself as "Jack Frost".[citation needed] Though often referred to without quotations, the correct title is "Love and Theft".
Contents |
[edit] The recording sessions
Sessions for "Love and Theft" were held at Sony Music's recording studios in midtown Manhattan, scheduled at approximately 3:30 p.m. every day between May 9th and the 21st in 2001.[citation needed] The players gathered for these sessions were Charlie Sexton on guitar, Larry Campbell on guitar as well as mandolin, violin, and banjo, Tony Garnier on bass, David Kemper on drums and percussion, and Augie Meyers on keyboards and accordion.[citation needed] Augie Meyers, who has known Dylan since the 1960s, had previously played in the Sir Douglas Quintet as well as Time Out of Mind. (Clay Meyers also contributed bongos on "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" and "Honest With Me.")[citation needed]
Dylan produced these sessions under the pseudonym, 'Jack Frost,' "because I didn’t feel any additional help was necessary. Not that I want to take credit or draw attention to myself. I don’t want to get flooded with calls from other people, asking me to pilot their records. Heh-heh-heh! It’s not like I'm in need of the work!"
In an interview with Rolling Stone Meyers said "There was none of this 'Hi, what's happening?' and a bit of BS. It was, 'OK, let's go to work.' After we were through, at ten o'clock at night, it seemed like we'd only been there a couple of hours, because it was so much fun. Every day was a special day, because every day was a new song."
Dylan wrote and re-wrote many of the lyrics to "Love and Theft" during the recording sessions, right on the spot. Dylan, says Meyers, would "fool around for a while with a song, then we'd cut it. And he'd say, 'I think I'm gonna write a couple more verses,' sit down and write five more verses. Each verse had six or eight lines. It's complicated stuff, and he was doing it right there."
The songs, Meyers adds, were mostly recorded live, including Dylan's vocals. "Bob don't like to overdub much," Meyers notes. "He would overdub some acoustic guitars, put some mandolin and fiddle on there. Sometimes he'd overdub his voice. If he messed up [a vocal], he'd overdub a word or two."
"Love and Theft" was notable for using Dylan's touring band during all of the sessions.[citation needed] Dylan had been touring with this unit since June 5, 1999, when Charlie Sexton replaced previous guitarist Bucky Baxter. Meyers was the only session player who was not part of that group, but even he had a relationship with guitarist Larry Campbell, who played with Meyers and Sir Douglas Quintet leader Doug Sahm back in the 1970s.[clarify][citation needed]
When it came to recording albums, Dylan often hired new session players rather than take his touring band into the studio. However, as many critics and fans had noticed, his live shows were steadily improving throughout the 1990s, and by 2001, his concerts were receiving a great deal of critical acclaim.[citation needed] Some argued that the Sexton-Campbell combo was perhaps his best backing band since the Band in 1974.[citation needed] The shows were marked by tight, focused arrangements that often lent themselves to lively improvisations between Sexton and Campbell. In an interview in Guitar World Magazine, published several months before Sexton joined the band, Dylan remarked, "if you're going to ask me what's the difference between now and when I used to play in the Seventies, Eighties and even back in the Sixties, the songs weren't arranged. The arrangement is the architecture of the song. And that's why our performances are so effective these days, because measure for measure we don't stray from the actual structure of the song. And once the architecture is in place, a song can be done in an endless amount of ways. That's what keeps my current live shows unadulterated. Because they're not diluted, or they're not jumbled up. They're not scrambled, they're not just a bunch of screaming... a conglomerated sound mix. It's like Skip James...once said: 'I don't want to entertain. What I want to do is impress with skill and deaden the minds of my listeners.' If you listen to his records -- his old records -- you know he can do that. But if you listen to the records he made in the Sixties, when they rediscovered him, you find that there's something missing. And what's missing is that interconnecting thread of the structure of the songs."
Dylan had previously recorded the Oscar-winning song, "Things Have Changed," using this group, but "Love and Theft" marked their first appearance on an entire album. At the time, nobody knew it would be their only album together, as the band gradually disbanded after 2002.[citation needed] "I think Bob has got the perfect thing," Meyers said, while the group was still intact. "Lord help him, if he can go for another ten or twelve years, I think that band will be there with him."
During the recording sessions, Dylan was mindful of past bootleg releases that've "been bought up by so-called hardcore fans of mine, whoever they might be - those folks out there who are obsessed with finding every scrap of paper I’ve ever written on, every single outtake. All right, that’s the world we live in. I accept it’s just the way things are. But the fact is that I can no longer be interested in it [material ‘released’ without his consent in this way]. It’s already been contaminated for me. I turn my back, move on to something else." As a result of the stricter controls exerted over his own recordings, Dylan was able to keep all of the studio work under wraps. "This time...my original wasn't floating around out there, and I felt able to go back and revisit it. I’m glad for once to have had the opportunity to do so."
[edit] The songs
The album is named after a 1993 study of blackface minstrelsy by University of Virginia social historian Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. However, "Love and Theft" is only tangentially about popular exploitation of black culture.[original research?] Not surprisingly the album's jaunty style was reminiscent of the live shows leading up to "Love and Theft", in which Dylan covered numerous songs pre-dating rock 'n' roll and re-arranged his older material with country and blues styles that also pre-dated rock 'n' roll.[citation needed]
""Love and Theft" becomes his Fables of the Reconstruction, to borrow an R.E.M. album title," writes Greg Kot in The Chicago Tribune (published Sep. 11, 2001), "the myths, mysteries and folklore of the South as a backdrop for one of the finest roots-rock albums ever made."
The opening track, "'Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, includes many references to parades in Mardi Gras in New Orleans, where participants are masked, and "determined to go all the way" of the parade route, in spite of being intoxicated. It rolls in like a storm, drums galloping over the horizon into ear shot, guitar riffs slicing with terse dexterity while a tale about a pair of vagabonds unfolds," writes Kot. "It ends in death, and sets the stage for an album populated by rogues, con men, outcasts, gamblers, gunfighters and desperados, many of them with nothing to lose, some of them out of their minds, all of them quintessentially American.
"They're the kind of twisted, instantly memorable characters one meets in John Ford's westerns, Jack Kerouac's road novels, but, most of all, in the blues and country songs of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. This is a tour of American music -- jump blues, slow blues, rockabilly, Tin Pan Alley ballads, country swing -- that evokes the sprawl, fatalism and subversive humor of Dylan's sacred text, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, the pre-rock voicings of Hank Williams, Charley Patton and Johnnie Ray, among others, and the ultradry humor of Groucho Marx."
"Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" also bears some influence from 19th century American poet Henry Timrod, with some lyrics nearly quoting his work.[original research?] For example, "A childish dream is now a deathless need" from Timrod's "A Vision of Poesy - Part 1" is repeated almost verbatim, and the song's lyrics ("They walk among the stately trees/They know the secrets of the breeze") echoes some other lines from the same poem:
"And high and hushed arose the stately trees, Yet shut within themselves, like dungeons, where Lay fettered all the secrets of the breeze"
Timrod would later become a greater influence on Dylan's 2006 album, Modern Times.[citation needed]
Unlike the other songs, the album's second track, "Mississippi" was originally recorded for Time Out of Mind in 1997, but it was omitted from that album.[citation needed] Sheryl Crow would later rework the song's melody, phrasing, and arrangement, and record it for The Globe Sessions, released in 1998, before Dylan revisited it for "Love and Theft". Subsequently the Dixie Chicks would make it a mainstay of their Top of the World, Vote for Change, and Accidents & Accusations Tours, in an approach that substantially followed Crow's.
"In the deceptively rollicking 'Summer Days,' a case of the wedding-day blues ends with the narrator high-tailing it out of town, but not before he sets 'fire to the place,'" writes Kot. An upbeat, fast-tempo number propelled by its swinging momentum, the arrangement recalls a number of jump blues recordings from the immediate post-WWII era. In the song, Dylan references the book The Great Gatsby in the lines "She says, "You can't repeat the past." / I say, "You can't? What do you mean, you can't? Of course you can."[original research?]
The following track is also performed with a retro arrangement, bearing a strong resemblance to small group, jazz recordings recorded in the 1930s and 1940s.[original research?] "Obsession turns to murder in the lounge-crooner ballad 'Bye and Bye,'" writes Kot, "as Dylan ominously declares, 'You were my first love, and you will be my last.'"
As Tim Riley of NPR notes, "[Dylan's] singing [on "Love and Theft"] shifts artfully between humble and ironic...'I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound,' he sings in 'Floater,' which is either hilarious or horrifying, and probably a little of both."
""Love and Theft" is, as the title implies, a kind of homage," writes Kot, "[and] never more so than on 'High Water (for Charley Patton),' in which Dylan draws a sweeping portrait of the South's racial history, with the unsung blues singer as a symbol of the region's cultural richness and ingrained social cruelties. Rumbling drums and moaning backing vocals suggest that things are going from bad to worse. 'It's tough out there,' Dylan rasps. 'High water everywhere.' Death and dementia shadow the album, tempered by tenderness and wicked gallows humor."
"'Po Boy,' scored for banjo with lounge chord jazz patterns, 'almost sounds as if it could have been recorded around 1920," says Riley. "He leaves you dangling at the end of each bridge, lets the band punctuate the trail of words he's squeezed into his lines, which gives it a reluctant soft-shoe charm."
The album closes with "Sugar Baby," a lengthy, dirge-like ballad, noted for its evocative, apocalyptic imagery and sparse production drenched in echo. Praising it as "a finale to be proud of," Riley notes that "Sugar Baby" is "built on a disarmingly simple riff that turns foreboding."
Christopher Ricks, a Warren Professor of the Humanities, writes extensively on "Sugar Baby" in his book, Dylan's Visions of Sin. "The song's beat is fourfold, and the rhythm of the instrumental opening is immediately confirmed by there being four syllables in each of the first two units. But the words that provide the title and that later open the refrain, 'Sugar Baby,' have their four syllables two by two, 2 x 2. The rhythm of the words 'Sugar Baby' is a dual rhythm, fourfold and twofold. And in pacing the song, Dylan pauses at certain points so as to make two syllables occupy the time and space that in the basic scheme of things will be expected to be occupied by four syllables. It is this movement in the voicing, with its pauses (contemplative, disconcerted, riven, chary, sardonic, shifting its grounds), that gives to the song its unique gait..." The song also bears the influence of Gene Austin's "Lonesome Road," first copyrighted in 1928; "Sugar Baby" even quotes a line from Austin's song: "Look up, look up and seek your Maker, 'fore Gabriel blows his horn." However, while both songs share a feeling of apocalyptic dread, the phrasing and structure is very different. "At every point in ['Lonesome Road'], the words and the music and the voice are fittingly in place," Ricks writes. "In ['Sugar Baby'], they are at odds. They move as the spirit takes them, and their spirit engages not only with the precious but with the precarious."
[edit] Aftermath
During the weeks leading up to its official release, "Love and Theft" was greeted with unanimous, overwhelming praise, even winning over skeptics who questioned or dismissed the merits of his previous release Time Out of Mind (an album marked by even greater media hype).[citation needed]
In a glowing review for his "Consumer Guide" column published by The Village Voice, Robert Christgau wrote: "Before minstrelsy scholar Eric Lott gets too excited about having his title stolen...he should recall that Dylan called his first cover album Self-Portrait. Dylan meant that title, of course, and he means this one too, which doesn't make "Love and Theft" his minstrelsy album any more than Self-Portrait's dire "Minstrel Boy" was his minstrelsy song. All pop music is love and theft, and in 40 years of records whose sources have inspired volumes of scholastic exegesis, Dylan has never embraced that truth so warmly. Jokes, riddles, apercus, and revelations will surface for years, but let those who chart their lives by Dylan's cockeyed parables tease out the details. I always go for tone, spirit, music. If Time Out of Mind was his death album--it wasn't, but you know how people talk--this is his immortality album. It describes an eternal circle on masterful blazz and jop readymades that render his grizzled growl as juicy as Justin Timberlake's tenor--Tony Bennett's, even. It's profound, too, by which I mean very funny. 'I'm sitting on my watch so I can be on time,' he wheezes, because time he's got plenty of." Christgau gave the album a rare A+.
Later, when The Village Voice conducted its Pazz & Jop Critics Poll for 2001, "Love and Theft" topped the list, the third Dylan album to accomplish this.
In 2003, the album was ranked number 467 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
By 2002, Dylan's touring band (the same unit which played on "Love and Theft") began to change. Kemper left, replaced by George Receli. This configuration was featured in Dylan's next project, Masked & Anonymous, but soon after, Charlie Sexton left the band. Larry Campbell would later follow. As of 2005, only bassist Tony Garnier remains.[citation needed]
[edit] 9/11
Unfortunately, when the album's release date finally came, it was not a day of celebration. "Love and Theft" reached stores on September 11, 2001, the same morning terrorists hijacked four domestic, American airplanes, crashing them into both World Trade Center buildings in New York City, the Pentagon Building in Washington, D.C and into a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Like a number of other albums completed before that day (such as Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot), the music press re-evaluated "Love and Theft" in the context of those attacks. Just as some critics found Dylan's health scare reflected in Time Out of Mind, which had been completed before Dylan's hospitalization, many saw Love and Theft's imagery as a reflection of the immediate reaction, the paranoid aftermath, and the apocalyptic nature surrounding the attacks themselves.[citation needed]
The two treacherous characters in "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" are described as "Living in the Land of Nod/Trustin' their fate to the Hands of God/They pass by so silently", a reference to the masked riders on Mardi Gras floats. In "Mississippi," lyrics like "City's just a jungle, more games to play/Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away" and "Sky full of fire, pain pourin' down" were read as prescient, as were some in "Summer Days," where Dylan sang "Yes, I'm leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift/Gonna break the roof in - set fire to the place as a parting gift." "Honest With Me" featured such lines as "Well, I'm stranded in the city that never sleeps" and "When I left my home the sky split open wide/I never wanted to go back there - I'd rather have died." "Sugar Baby" featured a verse where Dylan sings "Every moment of existence seems like some dirty trick/Happiness can come suddenly and leave just as quick/Any minute of the day the bubble could burst/Try to make things better for someone, sometimes, you just end up making it a thousand times worse."[original research?]
Even the political fall-out was seen in "High Water" and "Summer Days"; the former featured verses like "Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew/'You can't open your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view'/They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway Five/Judge says to the High Sheriff, 'I want him dead or alive/Either one, I don't care" while the latter had "Politician got on his jogging shoes/He must be running for office, got no time to lose/He been suckin' the blood out of the genius of generosity."
Such interpretations quickly became fashionable, but as other important events have taken shape and the attacks on the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and Shanksville, Pennsylvania recede into history, it's uncertain how long these interpretations will last. In an interview conducted by Alan Jackson for The Times Magazine in 2001, before the album was released, Dylan said "these so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music...I don't feel they know a thing, or have any inkling of who I am and what I’m about. I know they think they do, and yet it’s ludicrous, it's humorous, and sad. That such people have spent so much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a life, please. It’s not something any one person should do about another. You’re not serving your own life well. You’re wasting your life."
[edit] Allegations of "Theft"
In August 2003, The Wall Street Journal had a front page article detailing allegations of plagiarism in lyrics found in "Love and Theft". A number of lines were apparently taken from Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan's Underworld, a Japanese book written by Junichi Saga. Translated to English by John Bester, the book was a biography of one of the last traditional Yakuza bosses in Japan.
In the article published in the Journal, a line from "Floater" ("I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound") was traced to a line in the book, which said "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded." A number of other examples were listed, all of which can be found here.
The story caused a brief stir, but little came out of it. Saga told the Associated Press that he was ecstatic to have inspired such a well-known songwriter. Saga later told his publisher, Tokyo-based Kodansha International, that he had "absolutely no plans to sue," but he did add that he would haved preferred to be credited as a source for Dylan's songs.[citation needed] "Why would I sue? To take something that made people around the world happy and try to exploit it for money – that's poverty," Saga said. "This shows that people in other countries can relate to the harsh realities of prewar Japan, which was a poor, struggling nation. I'm just happy someone read my book and liked it."
The case was never brought to court, but it did raise some questions regarding 'fair use' and copyright infringement. For one, the book claimed to be an unauthorized memoir of a Yakuza's life, drawn from his own words without permission. Furthermore, every journalist noted the title "Love and Theft" was a blatant acknowledgement of 'theft' in music and pop culture, one of the peripheral themes of the album. (Before it was officially released, it was widely acknowledged that the title was also based on Lott's book.)[citation needed]
[edit] Track listing
All songs by Bob Dylan.
- "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" – 4:46
- "Mississippi" – 5:21
- "Summer Days" – 4:52
- "Bye and Bye" – 3:16
- "Lonesome Day Blues" – 6:05
- "Floater (Too Much to Ask)" – 4:59
- "High Water (For Charley Patton)" – 4:04
- "Moonlight" – 3:23
- "Honest with Me" – 5:49
- "Po' Boy" – 3:05
- "Cry a While" – 5:05
- "Sugar Baby" – 6:40
[edit] Samples
- "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" (file info) — play in browser (beta)
- "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum" by Bob Dylan
- Problems playing the files? See media help.
[edit] Miscellanea
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This section is currently a list, and needs cleanup. A good lead should be written for this, and/or the entire section converted to prose. Once this task is complete, please remove this message. (talk, help, how to edit) |
- The lyrics to Summer Days, She says, "You can't repeat the past." I say, "You can't? What do you mean, you can't? Of course you can" are a reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby which includes the following dialogue: "'Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!'"
- This is the second Dylan album to be released on September 11. Under The Red Sky was released on September 11, 1990, with the prior year's Oh Mercy album one day too late to make a ternary.
[edit] Credits
- Bob Dylan - vocals, guitar, piano
- Larry Campbell - guitar, banjo, mandolin, violin
- Charlie Sexton - guitar
- Tony Garnier - bass
- Augie Meyers - accordion, Hammond B3 & Vox organs
- David Kemper - drums
- Clay Meyers - bongos
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since March 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced quotes | Wikipedia articles needing clarification | Articles lacking in-text citations | Articles which may contain original research | Articles with sections that needed to be turned into prose | 2001 albums | Bob Dylan albums | Columbia Records albums
