Like all public figures, Bob Dylan is as much prisoner as master of his own persona. What distinguishes Dylan is that he has recognized that paradox with more probity than anybody else in rock. It's been central to his work since the day he arrived in Greenwich Village imitating Woody Guthrie and emulating Elvis Presley. As Ellen Willis pointed out nine years ago, celebrity is what Dylan's art is about.
As pop's demigod, Dylan is not just the processor but the product of our fantasies. We can make and have made of him anything we want: folk balladeer, misogynist, political pamphleteer, poet, romantic, rock aristocrat, mystic, poetaster. The list is infinite. But the great irony of Dylan's
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career is that his very elusiveness, his ability to remain one step ahead of the clutches of an audience (and critics) who would define him, has created the most lasting persona of all: the grandmaster of masks, the performer in complete command of his public fate. According to the new mythology, Dylan is not John Wesley Harding (he's been known to make foolish moves), but the Jack of Hearts ("There's no actor better ...").
Because the actions of American heroes are not allowed to be random, why becomes as important as what. This is particularly true when Dylan fails. To say then that Hard Rain is Dylan's least accessible, most chaotic and contemptuous album since Self Portrait is not enough. It doesn't explain why Dylan has made an album which demystifies the Rolling Thunder Revue instead of memorializing it.
The album is an enigma. There is no discernible reason why it's not a double set. Consisting of nine songs (four of which come from Dylan's TV special), Hard Rain ignores many of the songs most strongly associated with the Revue ("Just like a Woman," "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and "Sara," among others). It's atrociously recorded. Dylan's voice is mixed so disproportionately high that the band sounds like they're performing on a different stage. The effect is the aural equivalent of the close-ups on the television show: stringent domination. The album gives little sense of a live performance. The inclusion of applause and shouts by the audience is so random that it seems like an afterthought. Most of the arrangements are cut from the same monotonous cloth of stop-and-go, rise-and-fall rhythms.
Despite all of this, Hard Rain is not an abject failure. The second side works as a piece, a guided tour through love in ruins. The rawness which leads to havoc and tedium on the first side (particularly "Maggie's Farm" and "Memphis Blues Again") transforms "Shelter from the Storm" into a slashing roughneck rocker. Once again, Dylan is using violence to pry open his songs. The paranoid eruption of "Idiot Wind," which seemed out of context in the reflective atmosphere of Blood on the Tracks, fits perfectly within the psychodrama of Hard Rain.
But Hard Rain is problematic precisely b
