geoLibro.org

The good news is…no more Statler Brothers for a while. The bad news is that I’m officially disappointed by Bob Dylan’s Togther Through Life. I had heard David Hidalgo played accordion pretty much throughout. He does. I had heard it had a kind of Mexican cantina feel. It does, at times. I had heard it was made to sound like a Chess Records recording. It does (they could have done better with the percussion, but yeah, it does). So how all those elements added up to just a really good record and not a killer landmark album I just don’t know. There are of course standouts — “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” “Forgetful Heart,” “Shake Shake Mama” — but none of those are Dylan good. They’re just good.

So unfortunately one of my least favorites is geographic. “If You Ever Go to Houston” is a quite traditional cowboy brag that warns of all the dangerous places out West (places, of course, the protagonist frequents). Like so:

If you’re ever down there on Bagby and Lamar
You better watch out for the man with the shining star
Better know where you’re going or stay where you are
If you’re ever down there on Bagby and Lamar

Eh. One could argue it gets more interesting when we find this cowboy (Dylan himself, if you believe the bullshit he spews in recent interviews) is really just trying to squelch a “restless fever burning in [his] brain.”

If you ever go to Dallas
Say hello to Mary Ann
Say I’m still pulling on the trigger
Hanging on the best I can

If you see her sister Lucy
Say I’m sorry I’m not there
Tell her other sister Betsy
To pray the sinner’s prayer

Ah, so that’s it, is it? Anyway, I’ve been to Houston once and it wasn’t great. No Mary Anns, no Lucys, no dudes with shining stars, either. Interstates, concrete, and homeless people, one of whom (not terribly far from Bagby and Lamar, come to think of it) asked my wife and I for some spare change due to help pay for “formula for my wife and baby.” To which we deftly replied, “tell her to breastfeed and you can stay home.” So I suppose we could have been laid low with a knife twisting in our guts like in Bob Dylan’s dusty old cowpoke version of Houston after all. Still, there’s something disingenuous about Dylan’s new cowboy persona, isn’t there (or maybe it’s just the mustache that bothers me)? Obviously songs can be places of fantasy and Dylan has historically populated his works with characters of many kinds — and granted I wasn’t in Houston very long — but I have to wonder how much Houston was ever really like this, how much this track really represents a real place. Anyway, it just seems to me that a person like Dylan could probably write a great song about Houston as it is now and it would be more compelling than a tepid cowbody brag.