When did Bob Dylan become such a nostalgic? He's always had an ear for the language and music of the past, of course-- that's part of what's made him special from the get-go. Over the course of his past few albums, though, he's been framing himself as a one-man preservation society, the keeper of the flame for a conception of the popular song tradition that slams shut sometime around the release of his own first record in 1962. Together Through Life owes a lot to the sound of 1950s Chicago blues, in particular, and to a few other sorts of records it's easy to imagine Dylan playing on his "Theme Time Radio Hour". It's not surprising that a deluxe version comes with a bonus disc containing an episode of the radio show.
But Dylan's best records don't just use the ten thousand glittering fragments he's found in the history of music and literature, they transform his source material. This one is just a pastiche of records about which he's enthusiastic, and sometimes a blatant imitation of the kind of stuff they don't make any more. "Jolene" (not a Dolly Parton cover) lives down the street from Little Richard's "Lucille" and Chuck Berry's "Nadine"; "My Wife's Home Town" is just a set of lazy new lyrics grafted onto the Muddy Waters arrangement of Willie Dixon's "I Just Want to Make Love to You". "My band plays a different type of music than anybody else plays," Dylan recently told Rolling Stone. "As far as I know, no one else out there plays like this. Today, yesterday, and probably tomorrow." This suggests that he has never heard a moderately decent blues band in a bar. The one genuinely unprecedented element of the band's sound is his singing voice, which at this point is a wonder on the order of a wrecked 67 Saab that still manages to start even though the rust has penetrated clear through to the steering wheel.
Dylan tends to treat every album as a discrete project rather than as his latest status report; this one's parameters, besides "I've been listening to a lot of stuff on Chess lately and also some Tex-Mex and a little bit of Edith Piaf," are the welcome presence of David Hidalgo on lead accordion all over the place, and the somewhat more questionable presence of former Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who co-wrote the lyrics of nine of the album's 10 songs. (The other, uncredited co-lyricist, as the overseers of Dylan's concordance have already figured out, is Geoffrey Chaucer: Magpie Bob lifted a bunch of shiny words and phrases from David Wright's translation of The Canterbury Tales.) The lyrical persona this time alternates between old-dude-feeling-randy ("You are as whorish as ever, baby, you could start a fire") and old-dude-feeling-old ("The door has closed forevermore/ If indeed there ever was a door"). When Hunter and Dylan aren't firing off bon mots, though, they seem to be aiming for the unobtrusive universality of vintage popular songs-- the first line of the album is "oh well I love you pretty baby."
Together Through Life isn't without its charms-- Dylan never is. It's just very minor, especially by his standards. He's the most inconsistent of great popular musicians, because if there's one thing he's consistently kicked against, it's doing what anybody expects of him, including the standard late-career decline. After Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft, it's impossible to write him off as taking a long victory lap. But the Dylan record Together is closest to in spirit isn't those, or even Desire (the last time he collaborated on a full album with another lyricist). It's the commercial-country pastiche Nashville Skyline, a genre exercise that had a lot more spirit than this. That album's capstone was "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You", a sly, lithe love song; this one's is "It's All Good", a prefab boogie on which Dylan comes off like an indignant old crank grousing about glib, optimistic whippersnappers.
The ultimate test of a Dylan album, though, is to try to consider it outside the imposing context of his career--to imagine that the bramble-voiced old dude who co-wrote and sang these songs isn't the man who wrote Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks and Love and Theft, but Random Blues Journeyman #843. To which the reaction would have to be: This guy's pretty OK. He's tough to take at length, but he's clever, he's got some range, there's a funny line about Billy Joe Shaver and James Joyce. He might have something good in him sometime. He's worth keeping an eye on.
