Legend Of Dylan

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Then came an epiphany. He was in California with the Dead, practicing for the tour, when he saw a group of younger performers in a club. They were playing middle-of-the-road jazz standards, but they had a youthful energy. Says Dylan: "I suddenly realized, you know, years ago when I was young, whenever it was that I started out, I knew these kind of guys." He resolved to reconnect to his music. A few not-so-great albums followed, such as World Gone Wrong, but eventually Dylan found his path and released Time Out of Mind, and now Love and Theft. The end.

If this sounds a little apocryphal, that's part of the story too since Dylan--born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn.--has revised and reinvented his past from the very start of his career. On Summer Days, a track from Love and Theft, he sings, "She says, 'You can't repeat the past.' I say, 'You can't? What do you mean, you can't? Of course you can!'" Dylan talks like he sings, in that ancient lilting rasp, stressing unexpected syllables, mesmerizing with folky cadences, loping along somewhere between conversation and caterwauling. All the compositions on Love and Theft are autobiographical, he says. "Yeah, all of 'em. Every single one, every line. It's completely autobiographical, as most of my stuff usually is on one level or another."

Indeed, Love and Theft is an album of memories, of old genres and antique grooves. The songs have a sense of history and a sense of discovery; hearing them is like finding a stack of vintage records in an old uncle's attic. The opening track, Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, churns to a boogie-woogie-ish beat; the radiant Moonlight evokes Tin Pan Alley crooning and Western swing; and on the song High Water, Dylan pays tribute to blues pioneer Charley Patton. "All my songs, the styles I work in, were all developed before I was born," says Dylan. "When I came into the world, that spirit of things was still very strong. Billie Holiday was still alive. Duke Ellington. All those old blues singers were still alive. And I met and played with many of them. I learned a whole bunch of stuff from them. And that was the music that was dear to me. I was never really interested in pop music."

While the lyrics on Time Out of Mind are stark and dreary (the first line on the album is "I'm walking through streets that are dead"), the lyrics on Love and Theft are vibrant and visionary, loose-limbed and jokey. On Cry a While, Dylan actually uses the phrase "booty call"; on Po' Boy, he tells a knock-knock joke. On Mississippi, he summons up his old outsider spirit, singing, "I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town/I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down." But on Summer Days, he acknowledges that things have changed for the old rebel icon: "Well I'm drivin' in the flats in a Cadillac car/the girls all say, 'You're a worn-out star.'" Says Dylan: "I heard somebody say that to me."