Music: Tripping Through Old Times

Four stalwarts of the ’60s make some fresh new music

Of course, Bob Dylan said it best. “Yesterday’s just a memory/ Tomorrow is never what it’s supposed to be,” he sings in the chorus of a sweet and anxious love song on his new album. Infidels (Columbia) is a gruff and passionate reminder that rock-‘n’-roll greatness rates a little patience. It also neatly marks an unexpected passage: yesterday’s eminences energetically navigating their own channels of continuity. The past few weeks have seen major new releases not only by Dylan, but by Paul McCartney, elfin as ever; the Rolling Stones, who are still boogying on brimstone; and Paul Simon, still the musical poet of spaces between people where irresolution can kill passion with a shrug. These records are of varying quality, but all share a surprising point of unity. Yesterday is not just a memory, Dylan to the contrary. Rock’s recent past continues to help shape its tomorrows.

Dylan has been undergoing a period of grave spiritual uncertainty, from which bulletins have periodically issued forth like dispatches from some ancient war: Bob has been born again; Bob’s Christianity has waned and lapsed; Bob is searching for his roots in Judaism. The news was confusing; so were the records, like Slow Train Coming, that were issued in the wake of the gossip. Dylan’s songs of faith managed to be reverent and uncommitted at the same time, as if, by singing to the listener, he was also trying to convince himself and calm his restless soul.

On Infidels, he seems reconciled to restlessness. He also sounds full of fight and the same kind of lacerating spite that passes through the heart like a spike. Jokerman, the album’s stunning opener, carries a typically barbed and enigmatic rebuke: “You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah/ But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister.” The jokerman of the title, like many of Dylan’s metaphorical protagonists, is part salvation hunter, part satanic twister, and the whole record is like a loosely arranged pilgrim’s progress through emotional listlessness and political chaos. Sweetheart Like You, with a lovely and insinuating melody, takes the oldest cliche in the pickup book (“What’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this?”) and works from a sexy come-on into an image of hell all the more effective for being surprising and funny.

The state of Israel is ironically cast as the Neighborhood Bully, and it summons memories of Dylan back when the times were a-changin’. “The neighborhood bully just lives to survive/ He’s criticized and condemned for being alive/ He’s not supposed to fight back, he’s supposed to have thick skin/ He’s supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in/ He’s the neighborhood bully.” Union Sundown is an agitated piece about how dreams of workers and solidarity have been sold out by greed, while the song that ends the album, Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight, combines tentative feelings of love with bleak reveries of fate in a way that no writer of simple love songs ever could.

Infidels is prime Dylan, but the master of simple love songs, Paul McCartney, is his own worst enemy on Pipes of Peace (Columbia). After last year’s superb Tug of War, McCartney returns to his deep-pile pop and sinks without a trace. Some of this material was apparently intended for Tug of War; it would have been kinder to McCartney’s reputation if the stuff had stayed on file. You have to be very good indeed to survive lyrics like “I know I was a crazy fool/ For treating you the way I did/ But something took hold of me/ And I acted like a dustbin lid.” There are two collaborations with Michael Jackson, the wonder boy of mainstream soul, that sound peppy only by comparison with the rest of the record, which may be remembered as the album that asked (in Keep Under Cover) the question “What good is butter if you haven’t got bread?/ What good is art when it hurts your head?” No headaches here.

Undercover (Rolling Stones/Atlantic) begins with the Rolling Stones doing a kind of ghetto-blaster version of Sympathy for the Devil called Undercover of the Night. Like much of the best Stones stuff, this song is a dance through a nightmare, behind a slick, heavy beat that is unmistakably contemporary and irresistibly funky. The lyrics make scary references to “100,000 disparus lost in the jails in South America” and “The smell of sex/ The smell of suicide.” Undercover of the Night launches two sides of grizzly humor, humid sexuality and gut-level rock. The song titles—Too Much Blood, She Was

Hot, Tie You Up (The Pain of Love)—promise the band at its naughtiest and nastiest, but Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are delighting here in twisting their band’s carefully cultivated bad-boy image into a tight knot. All the Way Down takes a typically randy, amoral Stones musical protagonist and sets him up against a woman who is more than just his match. Undercover is a rough-and-tumble reminder that, as Jagger sings in It Must Be Hell, “The strength of darkness still abides.”

Like 1981’s Tattoo You, it confirms that the Stones, in hearty middle age as a band, are on a fresh roll. “Negotiations and love songs,” Paul Simon observes, “are often mistaken for one and the same.”

Anyone capable of such a misperception might also pardonably take Simon for the best musical litigator in the business. Hearts and Bones (Warner Bros.), an album of old and lost love, shattered dreams and delicate possibilities, is rueful, mature, self-mocking and hauntingly melodic in a way that is supposed to get rock in trouble: too far from the street, too close to the stage.

Simon, who after all has built bridges over troubled waters, is masterly enough to span that gap. Any record that encompasses doo-wop, Philip Glass and the fragile orchestrations of the French film composer Georges Delerue is bold by any standard. Anyone who writes lyrics that sound like the poet Ted Hughes on sabbatical in the Brill Building rates a very close listen indeed. Simon’s musical agility and lyrical literacy may seem suspect to an audience that wants its rock rougher. He irrefutably proves that hard edges run a poor second to deep thought. Hearts and Bones explores the gap between thought and feeling. Think Too Much is a classic statement of the quandary (“Have you ever experienced a period of grace/ When your brain just takes a seat behind your face”) that keeps the record buoyant even at its bleakest. A piece of compact virtuosity, Hearts and Bones ends with a tribute to John Lennon that is a little like a streamlined time transport. “It was the year of the Beatles/ It was the year of the Stones/ It was 1964…” Nearly 20 years on, and it seems like a good year all over again—especially with Paul Simon along for the ride. —By Jay Cocks