Dylan, Sunny Side Up

Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos There are no Dylan epics like “Highlands” here, nor too much, really, to tax the brain, but there is plenty to dance to, shake to, even laugh to. Together Through Life is above all a musical album, which may disappoint the Bob Dylan wing of English departments throughout the land. The album’s look drives that home. The front cover, already spread around the Internet, is one of Bruce Davidson’s photographs of a Brooklyn gang taken in 1959, depicting a serious make-out session in the backseat of a speeding car: Love and Sex. But the album’s back cover is completely musical—a Josef Koudelka photograph, taken in 1968, of a band of Romanian gypsy musicians, with an accordionist right in the middle.

There is, yes, a protest song, but more humorous than accusatory, sending up the inane, omnipresent, motivational-speaker cliché, “It’s all good!” (Politically minded fans who might have expected a Dylan song entitled “Feel a Change Coming On,” to pick up where Sam Cooke or maybe Barack Obama left off will be surprised by its reflective later-in-the-day love lyric in which the singer announces his high-low taste in books and music, and which has a bridge that some will hear as Dylan himself truly speaking: “Dreams never worked for me, anyway/ Even when they did come true.” The song also includes a lovely, poignant lifting from Nehemiah 9:3 about “the fourth part of the day” —a time of confession and prayer in the Bible—being nearly gone.)

In 1965, the year that Dylan famously played electric at the Newport Folk Festival, the fetishists of authenticity (along with fans who just loved great American music) clung to the re-discovered black blues artists who were enjoying a last taste of celebrity singing the songs they had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s for the Vocalion and Okeh and Bluebird labels. There was Son House (who was 63 years old), and Mississippi John Hurt (in his early seventies), and Mance Lipscomb (exactly 70), as well as a younger cohort that included Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim, who were both 50. Now the untamed young musical expeditionary of 1965 is right up there with the old guys—he turns 68 in May—yet he’s not just reinventing and performing his old songs for college kids, but turning the old into the new and then back again, with fresh myth-laden music that achieves the amazing feat (which Dylan says has noticed in Obama’s writing, which he say he admires) of making you think and feel at the same time. This time out, though, maybe more than ever, he also rouses you to dance and dance, and then dance some more, before heading for the exits, and then, well… then seeing what more might develop.

Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University whose books include The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and historian-in-residence at Bob Dylan's officialWeb site.