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J.A. Montalbano: Soundtrack of indie talents offers another, better side of Dylan

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By J.A. Montalbano
Friday, November 2, 2007

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These days, if you want Bob Dylan, it's better without Bob Dylan.

This autumn, as the legendary troubadour releases yet another uninspired best-of (this time it's three discs of the same songs you've heard over and over), a project by filmmaker Todd Haynes has drawn Hollywood hipsters to explore Dylan's persona and indie-music all-stars to dig deep into his catalog.

Dylan certainly has slowed down in recent years. He has put out only one excellent studio album of original material in the past 18 years ("Time Out of Mind"). Now is as good a time as ever to explore his back pages.

The film "I'm Not There," which is scheduled to open Nov. 21, was co-written and directed by Haynes, known for "Far From Heaven" with Julianne Moore and "Velvet Goldmine" with Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale. Haynes also worked with Randall Poster and film music veteran Jim Dunbar to craft the soundtrack for "I'm Not There." (A bunch of tracks were produced by Joe Henry.)

The two-disc set begins and ends, respectively, with the requisite tunes "All Along the Watchtower" (by Eddie Vedder) and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (a hushed reading by Antony and the Johnsons). Each one is paired with versions of the new title song from the movie, one done by Sonic Youth and the other by Dylan himself, both listless.

But in between, Dylan's catalog is plumbed like never before, with an impressive roster that rarely hits a false note.

"All Along the Watchtower" has been beaten into the ground, but here Vedder is blown away by the star-studded Million Dollar Bashers, which includes members of Sonic Youth, pop-jazz keyboardist John Medeski, new-wave survivor Tom Verlaine and avant-garde guitarist supreme Nels Cline (lately of Wilco), with a couple of Dylan's touring gunslingers thrown in: Tony Garnier and Smokey Hormel.

On another track, Medeski gives a slight lounge twist to his tortured Hammond organ riffs on "Ballad of a Thin Man," and Verlaine smolders through 1997's grief-stricken "Cold Irons Bound."

"Watchtower" was a highlight of 1967's "John Wesley Harding" album, which is represented with three other tracks: "As I Went Out One Morning" by Mira Billotte; a deconstructed "The Wicked Messenger" by the bluesy Black Keys; and "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" by X frontman John Doe, who then goes deeper into Dylan's oeuvre to retrieve "Pressing On" from 1980's gospel-soaked album, "Saved." (He blows Dylan out of the water.)

Other bootleg specials and rarities include "Moonshiner" (by Bob Forrest), "Man in the Long Black Coat" (Mark Lanegan), "Can't Leave Her Behind" (Pavement's Stephen Malkmus), "Mama, You've Been On My Mind" (Jack Johnson) and the highlight of the "Biography" compilation, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window," with the Brooklyn quartet Hold Steady up to the challenge. Yo La Tengo mines that same fertile mid-'60s garage era with "Fourth Time Around" and "I Wanna Be Your Lover."

But wait, as those old K-Tel commercials (or was it the ones for Ginzu knives?) used to say, there's more:

• Los Lobos unearth the nugget "Billy 1" from the "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" soundtrack, and their loose-limbed execution is magical.

• Willie Nelson brings nobility to one of the man's most overlooked ballads, "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)."

• Wilco's Jeff Tweedy steps up to tackle "Simple Twist of Fate" like the Dylan disciple he is.

• Glen Hansard of the Frames and his "Once" co-star Marketa Irglova throw down "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere." And the Basement Tapes get another reading with "Goin' to Acapulco" by Jim James with Calexico.

Those moody dudes from Tucson, Calexico, are featured on four tracks. The most amazing is the band's soft mariachi backing of "One More Cup of Coffee" from 1975's "Desire." You might cringe at the thought of anyone trying to match Dylan and Emmylou Harris' original harmonies, but here it's ex-Byrds leader Roger McGuinn backed by Chicago's Kelly Hogan, one of the few contemporaries in Harris' league. (Check out Hogan's solo albums on Bloodshot Records in which she covers the likes of Nelson, the Statler Brothers and Magnetic Fields.)

The roster of current indie gifted children continues:

• Iron & Wine, slowing down the haunting "Dark Eyes" from "Empire Burlesque."

• Cat Power (Chan Marshall), appropriately, at this point in her career, "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again."

• Sufjan Stevens, stumbling through a too-twee reading of "Ring Them Bells."

• Mason Jennings, reverent on the '64 anthems "The Times They Are A-Changin' " and "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."

• Karin O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs hootin' it up on "Highway 61 Revisited" (but revealing her to be no Polly Jean Harvey).

"I'm Not There" effortlessly mixes veterans — Ramblin' Jack Elliott with a shamblin' version of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" and Richie Havens showing a reason to be nervous throughout "Tombstone Blues" — with relative newcomers like Charlotte Gainsbourg, who takes the handoff from Havens for her own, wispy version of "Just Like a Woman," in which she sounds as if she's about to break like a little girl.

There is a sweep and depth to the soundtrack that Dylan and Sony/Columbia just never seem to grasp whenever it's time to trot out another best-of collection. (The latest, "Dylan," was released Oct. 2.) We always get the same '60s hits followed by a quota of one or two songs from each subsequent album, whether that album yielded 10 great songs ("Blood on the Tracks") or none ("Under the Red Sky").

But Haynes' soundtrack breaks from those chains and lets the man's music explode across genres and generations.

In Haynes' film, Dylan is shown at different points at his life. He is portrayed by four men (Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Ben Whishaw), a woman (Cate Blanchett) and a black child (Marcus Carl Franklin, who contributes to the soundtrack with a faithful version of "When the Ship Comes In").

No reviewers have weighed in on the movie yet, but the soundtrack dropped on Tuesday, and it suggests the film might pierce some layers of the slowly melting myth that we might not have seen before.

It's not easy to reinterpret the bard of rock 'n' roll with the distinctive voice and the sophisticated phrasing.

Interestingly, there are no songs from what perhaps is the most Dylanesque Dylan album of all, "Another Side" (1964).

We all have our limitations, you could say, and we should have the sense not to mess with a man when he paints his masterpiece.