Bruce Springsteen said that hearing the opening snare shot of "Like a Rolling Stone" was like the door to his mind being kicked open.
It wasn't just Bruce who had his world flipped by Dylan, because, for a lot of people - affectionately known by most college students as "Mom" or "Dad" - Bob Dylan was the catalyst that opened their eyes to the music, philosophy and all the other good vibrations of the '60s. So Dylan could have recorded some retread of his '60s work and let the five-star reviews from baby boomer critics roll in.
But "Modern Times" is a success with those of us who remember "Like a Rolling Stone" not as a mind-blowing, life-changing experience, but as a very good classic rock song. Dylan is not interested in being the voice of a graying generation.
In what is politely called his "late-career resurgence," Dylan has started from scratch by inventing a new persona for himself, a trick he has perpetrated throughout his career. When the bohemians listening to his protest songs started limiting him, Dylan plugged in and scared them off. When electric Dylan was played out, he killed his cool and became a country bumpkin on "John Wesley Harding" (1968) and "Nashville Skyline" (1969). On this record, as on his last (2001's "Love and Theft"), he's taken up the Jack Frost persona (also the pseudonym under which he produced both records).
Dylan as "Frost" is someone you'd picture riding and gambling on a Mississippi river boat beside Huck Finn. Sometimes this makes it seem like he has slipped through a time portal. With timeless, simple lines like, "I'm crazy for you girl/ You ought to be a fool about me," it would not be hard to picture soldiers returning from home in the '40s dancing to "Spirit on the Water."
Dylan plays with this timelessness of his music on "The Levee's Gonna Break." From the title, it seems reasonable to believe that it would be about Hurricane Katrina. But the old blues style makes it seem like this was a flood on the Mississippi about a hundred years ago. The lyrics are vague and universal enough that it could be about either, which could just be Dylan's way of telling us that modern times aren't as isolated from the past as we'd like to think.
Time, and its dwindling abundance, plays another role on "Modern Times." After a musical icon receives his membership to AARP in the mail, we expect his lyrical gaze to turn towards the inevitable. On the album closer, "Ain't Talkin,'" Dylan sees he's fallen behind the times, and Dylan says he practices "a faith I've long since abandoned."
In the same song, he finds the metaphorical gardener has abandoned the garden, and over the whole record we catch glimpses of the apocalypse. Dylan sees something coming to an end, but he is not fixated on it. He keeps moving; "He ain't talkin'/ Just walkin.'"
These visions of death and the apocalypse swirl below the surface of the record like rip currents, pulling you under if you let them, but they do not overwhelm it, and they are not its heart.
In a reworking of the blues standard "Rollin' and Tumblin,'" Dylan admits to "conjuring long dead souls from their crumbling tombs," but then turns right around and invites a lady to forgive him and come down to the bay. While God's preparing some Old Testament-style vengeance on "Thunder on the Mountain," Bob's "sittin' down studying the art of love/ Think it will fit me like a glove" and wondering where he can find Alicia Keys.
On "When the Deal Goes Down," Dylan sums it all up, "We live and we die/ We know not why/ But I'll be with you/ When the deal goes down." Could the love of today be more important than the death in the distance, even when the darkness is closing in quickly? In modern times when, unless you work for Halliburton, things aren't so great, it's a legitimate question.
We all wish there was someone that could make a record, write a book or direct a movie that would capture our problems and offer solutions to guide us through. We could look to Bob Dylan as the idealistic idol of the baby boomers for the answer, but we'd just be disappointed. Dylan sees the darkness out there on the approaching horizon, but he can't offer a solution for it.
Dylan is not trying to be Shakespeare, write Revelations, or live up to the mounting pile of fawning books written about the Dylan legend; he's simply writing a great rock record. Instead of a solution, he offers rock n' roll's oldest and favorite subject, love, as an alternative. "Modern Times" may only be rock n' roll, but that's no reason not to like it.
