Free Night Beat by Mikal Gilmore Page B

edges of the room. Like everyone else, they are smiling at this music: romping, bawdy, jolting rock & roll—the sort of indomitable music a man might conjure if he were about to lay claim to something big.
    The guitars crackle, the horns honk and wail, the drums and bass rumble and clamor wildly, and then the room returns to silence. T-Bone Burnett, turning to Kooper, seems to voice a collective sentiment. “Man,” he says, “that
gets
it.”
    “Yeah,” says Kooper. “So
dirty.”
    Everyone watches Dylan expectantly. For a moment, he appears to be in some distant, private place. “Subterranean,” is all he says, still smiling. “Positively subterranean,” he adds, running his hand through his mazy brown hair, chuckling. Then he walks into an adjoining room, straps on his weatherworn Fender guitar, tears off a quick, bristling blues lick and says, “Okay, who wants to play lead on this? I broke a string.”
    Dylan has been like this all week, turning out spur-of-the-moment, blues-infused rock & roll with a startling force and imagination, piling up instrumental tracks so fast that the dazed, bleary-eyed engineers who are monitoring the sessions are having trouble cataloging all the various takes—so far, well over twenty songs, including gritty R & B, Chicago-steeped blues, rambunctious gospel, and raw-toned hillbilly forms. In part, Dylan is working fast merely as a practical matter: Rehearsals for his American tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers start in only a couple of weeks, and though it hardly seems possible in this overmeticulous, high-tech recording era, he figures he can write, record, mix, and package a new studio LP in that allotted term. “You see, I spend too much time working out the
sound
of my records these days,” he had told me earlier. “And if the records I’m making only sell a certain amount anyway, then why should I take so long putting them together? . . . I’ve got a lot of different records inside me, and it’s time just to start getting them
out.”
    Apparently, this is not idle talk. Dylan has started perusing songs for a possible collection of new and standard folk songs and has also begun work on a set of Tin Pan Alley covers—which, it seems safe to predict, will be something to hear. At the moment, though, as Dylan leads the assembled band through yet another roadhouse-style blues number, a different ambition seems to possess him. This is Bob Dylan the rock & roller, and despite all the vagaries of his career, it is still an impressive thing to witness. He leans lustily into the songs’ momentum at the same instant that he invents its structure, pumping his rhythm guitar with tough, unexpected accents, much like Chuck Berry or Keith Richards, and in the process, prodding his other guitarists, Kooper and Rosas, to tangle and burn, like good-natured rivals. It isn’t until moments later, as everybody gathers back into the booth to listen to the playback, that it’s clear that this music sounds surprisingly like the riotous, dense music of
Highway 61 Revisited—
music that seems as menacing as it does joyful, and that, in any event, seems to erupt from an ungovernable imagination. Subterranean, indeed.

    IF THERE WAS any central message to Bob Dylan’s early music, perhaps it was that it isn’t easy for a bright, scrupulous person to live in a society that honors the inversion of its own best values, that increasingly turns from the notions of community and democracy to the twisted politics of death and abundance. To live through such times with conscience and intelligence intact, Dylan said in his music, one had to hold a brave and mean mirror up to the face of cultural corruption.
    These days, of course, the politics of corruption and death are doing just fine, and are fairly immune to any single pop star’s acts of sedition. But back in the fevered momentum of the 1960s, when he first asserted himself, Dylan had a colossal impact on the changing face of American