Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus

about everything, yep
Makes ya stop and, wonduh why
    Or this way:
    People disagreein’ everywhere ya look
Makes ya wanna stop and, uh, read a book!

    Wow, says the voice, I rhymed it!
    Hmmm. Rock ’n’ roll is fun. I’d almost forgotten.
    Dylan is still working on his myth of retirement and withdrawal, which from a different perspective is simply the problem of the private artist and art that seeks to make itself completely public. There’s very little slack in his songs these days; they are perfectly controlled little statements, not so much about where Bob Dylan’s head is at as about where he thinks the possibilities of staking out your own ground lie; how you deal with the world without being captured by it. The leitmotif of New Morning was that “12th Avenue bus moving west,” and again and again the songs addressed the same problem: escape. The whole album moves west, but it never really gets there. That, in the end, is what makes it so American. The only way to keep the West from turning into what you left it for is not to go. Then the dream still means something.
    Good humor turns sour. If one scene comes down too strong you can split back to the place where you were born and see what it looks like, but it’s not only that you can’t go home again—who would want to? Then dreams take over. You can always get away for a weekend—assuming the babysitter’s free—but “Sign on the Window” isn’t about a second honeymoon, it’s about a second life. Does the smelly 12th Avenue bus pull up at a trout stream in Utah? But that cabin, wife and kids, fish and a big sky—that’s a powerful dream. Its power, rather than its irrelevance, was most likely the thing that made so many of us critics deny it so quickly, as if we were overjoyed that the bus never really left New York. Nothing was resolved, but plenty was revealed.
    Now Dylan is looking at it all from the other side, rocking a little harder, singing a little louder, playing the fading image of the country gentleman against the older one of the city boy, the memory of the flaming youth against the puzzled father. His songs, it seems, are about growing up without growing away—from his audience as well as from his own past—the possibilities of change without betrayal. Dylan is smart enough to have always been aware
that there are real questions as to whether or not those things are possible. There’s little question that he lacks the answer and even less that he’s interested in looking for one.
    But Dylan’s manipulation of his own themes—themes that he has appropriated and made his own—brings up strange problems that even he may have missed, like how to make a hit record. I think the most interesting thing about “Watching the River Flow” is that it isn’t a hit, and why not. In this case, my guess is that the time has passed when people are interested in hearing Bob Dylan say he’ll just sit there and watch the river flow, and even though that’s not quite what he’s saying, it is what people hear. If they are too impatient to hear him contradict himself, it may be because Dylan is becoming a victim of his own subtlety. I think the time has come when Dylan has to conquer the audience all over again, if he wants to have one. And I hope he’s interested in trying that.
     
    Bob Dylan, “Watching the River Flow” (Columbia, 1971).

BANGLA DESH
    Creem
    March 1972
     
    The whole Bangla Desh set was premiered over the radio a few nights ago, neatly coinciding with the Indian Army’s rout of the West Pakistani forces and the liberation of the East, thus putting the sweet seal of history on the cause that launched this record in the first place. Three of us sat listening for an hour or more, though admittedly we weren’t as polite as the audience at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangla Desh at Madison Square Garden last August: we turned off the first half-hour of Ravi Shankar. Then the Harrison-Leon Russell-Mad Dogs & So On part