Rebelious Jukebox

Bob Dylan "Highway 61 Revisited" / Silver Jews "The Natural Bridge"

By Stephen Pastel & David Keenan. Originally appeared in Melody Maker.

DK: David Keenan

At the ICA, London, lying on the floor…

SP: There’s something about songs, such a great medium to express ideas within the limitations of the English language. People like Berman, there’s just so much freshness in those words, it always sounds so new. I don’t think Berman’s like are that clever, in a way, they’re beyond that. Silver Jews “Natural Bridge”, there’s probably not an equivalent record for me this year, maybe Smog’s “Red Apple Falls”, just a record I never get tired of and can play over and over, just enjoy. There’s something pastoral and rural about the Silver Jews and sometimes I just want to really be a part of that, just open up to that gothic American tradition. I think they’re a mythical, magic band.

DK: The period of Dylan they make me think of is when he was up in Woodstock recording the Basement Tapes.

SP: Yeah or “Nashville Skyline”.

DK: Getting back to the mythical America.

SP: It’s an America that’s got a kind of…that ‘post’ idea of America that makes you just want to travel the land. Everything you ever felt through Kerouac.

DK: The skies

SP: Y’know, just calling your album “The Natural Bridge”

DK: It’s difficult to talk about the Silver Jews in critical terms because, well, I know exactly what he means and what I feel about “The Natural Bridge” but I can’t go any further towards elucidating it than that.

SP: Berman’s writing is really great cause on one hand he’s always got this kind of ‘Olde Worlde’ kind of thing. You can imagine him as some front line reporter trying to document the American civil war and at the same time there’s something really ‘hip’ about it. He’s mixing that up with almost hip-hop kids dealing with each other. I love that and Dylan’s like that, he’s so fucking, his language is so hip but timeless also. Probably my favourite Dylan record is “Highway 61 Revisited”; “Queen Jane Approximately” is my favourite Dylan song. He can mix up lines of genuine profundity with nonsense but keep a consistency of mood, it’s direct and it’s unfathomable, really highbrow but also kind of pop. Back to the idea that we’re trying to run through this intellectual high art thing. People are digging it and getting it.

DK: Dylan always said ”I’m not a poet”, he’s a performer, a rock musician, a folk artist, not a ‘poet’, y’know? What Dylan did was expand the parameters of a nascent artform and when people see that they want to claim him for high art rather than allow him to validate this whole bastard form.

SP: When you think of the development of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Dylan going electric is the equivalent of what the industrial revolution is to the history of England.

DK: Just think what it must have been like to be a bright kid who loved rock music and then Dylan came along. What a fuckin’ gift! It must have been so exciting.

SP: I mean I like The Rolling Stones from around the same period when Dylan was ‘at his peak’ but there’s a 3-dimensional quality to him which the Stones don’t have. You could look at a great album like “Beggar’s Banquet” and know that the Stones would be bad in twenty years time. You could see that. Whereas when you look at something like “Nashville Skyline” you think there is probably hope that the new Dylan record could be really good – in a way it’s still surprising but in a way it isn’t.

DK: Dylan, like Mingus or Bill Wells, is a person who is motivated primarily just by his individual instinct. Dylan never followed.

SP: Coming back to our theme, it’s this preparedness to be fashionable or unfashionable, there’s something really sad about the Stones, they always want to look hip and with the kids and that’s why you get preposterous things like Jagger with 16 year old girls in their videos looking really turned on by them. It’s really pretty unlikely, y’know? It’s dishonest.

DK: No matter how difficult you might find it to understand or empathise with Dylan’s massive Christian conversion, the thing about Dylan which I love, is for one guy to have such belief in the face of everything and that’s all the way through his career, from playing electric at Newport in the face of people like Pete Seeger who saw it as this massive betrayal, then to go on to be the biggest counter-cultural figure and walk out and give these OTT pro-Christian rants to his fans. And Bob’s Christianity wasn’t particularly enlightened or benign, it was total “you will all burn in Hell”. Total belief again. Everyone is saying, “Bob, what the fuck are you doing? ” But for him that was that. Incredible. In the face of everything, I respect that so much.