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The rock bard explores cosmic American mysteries on an album that feels stunningly timely.

Bob Dylan
Rough and Rowdy Ways
Columbia
ROCK

By Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone

nother apocalypse -- another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterpiece for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in eight years, and it's an absolute classic -- it has the bleak majesty of latter-day Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even deeper into cosmic American mysteries.

Dylan's first album of original material in 8 years, Rough and Rowdy Ways is also his first since becoming the only songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 2016. Its 10 tracks include the three new songs released in the spring of 2020: the album's lead-off track, "I Contain Multitudes," the nearly 17-minute epic "Murder Most Foul," and "False Prophet."

Dylan gave his first taste of the album with his 17-minute epic "Murder Most Foul," which he dropped in the early weeks of the pandemic. It sets the tone for the whole album -- a hallucination of American history as a jukebox, a late-night musical tour of the Desolation Row where we find ourselves right now. All over Rough and Rowdy Ways, he mixes up Chicago blues, Nashville twang, Memphis rock & roll -- all the music in the American grain. His voice sounds marvelously nimble and delicate, whether he's preaching doom, pitching woo, or cracking jokes like "I'll take the Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando/ Mix 'em up in a tank and get a robot commando."

"My Own Version of You" is a Bride of Frankenstein fantasy with Dylan as a mad scientist, assembling a creature in his lab out of stolen body parts. He promises his creation, "I'm gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell/ Like Liberace -- like St. John the Apostle." In the sinister blues stomp "Crossing the Rubicon," Dylan warns, "I'll cut you up with a crooked knife, Lord, and I'll miss you when you're gone." Key West (Philosopher Pirate)" is a nine-minute accordion noir about an aging desperado heading off to Florida for his last stand, with only his radio to remind him of the life he left behind. It conjures the elegiac mood of Robert De Niro at the end of The Irishman.

"Murder Most Foul" ends the album with a boom -- he uses the JFK assassination as his departure point for a fever-dream ramble through cultural memory, praying to the DJ with a litany of music legends, like a cross between Walt Whitman and Wolfman Jack. As Dylan pushes 80, his creative vitality remains startling -- and a little frightening. (Light a candle for the late Leonard Cohen: He no longer owns the crown for the best album made by a 79-year-old.) It took a pandemic to put a pause on Dylan's Never Ending Tour. But he refuses to rest on his legend. On Rough and Rowdy Ways, he is exploring terrain nobody else has reached before -- yet just keeps pushing on into the future. * * * * 1/2

Many Seventies touring veterans are asking when -- and if -- it will be safe to resume their careers.

As told to Patrick Doyle, Andy Greene and Brian Hiatt in Rolling Stone

STEVIE NICKS

All we have right now, if you're home in quarantine, is time, unless you're taking care of kids. So, really, you could do anything that you've been wanting to do your whole life. That's how I'm trying to look at it. But, even though I didn't have a tour planned, my brain doesn't know that yet. My brain is like, "OK, you came off the road, and usually you would be going to rehearse." It's still bugging me that I should be getting ready for something, and I'm not. This has never happened to me ever in my life. The second I come off the tour with one career, the phone's ringing off the hook form the other career, saying, "Are you ready to do something cool?" This is the year I was going to talk to everybody about making my movie and do some recording and meet new people. Well, you're not going to meet any new people, because you can't leave your house.

SAMMY HAGAR

I'll be comfortable playing a show before there's a vaccine, if it's declining and seems to be going away. I'm going to make a radical statement here. This is hard to say without stirring somebody up, but truthfully, I'd rather personally get sick and even die, if that's what it takes. We have to save the world and this country from this economic thing that's going to kill more people in the long run. I would rather see everyone go back to work. If some of us have to sacrifice on that, OK. I will die for my children and my grandchildren to have a life anywhere close to the life that I had in this wonderful country. That's just the way that I feel about it. I'm not going to go around spreading the disease. But there may be a time where we have to sacrifice. I mean, how many people die on the Earth every day? I have no idea. I'm sorry to say it, but we all gotta die, man.

DAVID CROSBY

I'm not making any money from anywhere and [my house] is in jeopardy. I'm not whining about it, though -- it's what we have to do, or we can't beat the coronavirus. But I don't think most people know what it's done to the music business. It's everyone that I know. They're completely out out of work, and a lot of them don't make a lot of money. Everyone is like, "You're a rock star and you drive in a Cadillac and you burn money." Bullshit. Ninety percent of us are working people, and our job is gone. I hope I'm back on tour next year, but I'm not sure I've got a next year. That's the thing: I'm almost 80 years old. When you take away my next year, you might have just taken the last one I got. That's a bitch. I think they are doing the right thing to not have aggregations of people, but don't kid yourself about the effect. To us? To the musicians? It's a goddamn disaster.

JUDY COLLINS

We've been trying to figure out how to get me two months off the road for a long time, and now we've got it. I actually looked at a picture of myself the other day and I thought, "I look rested!" Of course I miss it. I usually do 120 shows a year, so I'm out at least half the year. I love to travel, but I'm not eager to jump the gun, because we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to keep this thing at bay. I am not interested in pushing anything anti-lockdown, because I am afraid a lot of people are going to die. Right now, I'm taking part in what's required of me -- which is to sit tight, practice, keep myself in shape, walking [in Central Park] with a mask and a pair of gloves. Last night I played Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows," and one of the lyrics is "Everybody knows that the plague is coming" -- and it is here. He left us with his last album, You Want It Darker, and we're getting it darker.

TOM PETERSSON

In a way, it's nice, because we've never had much more than a month off, or six weeks at the most, ever. We're always on call, and we work year-round. We've got a small business going here. We can't afford to just stop. We're not living paycheck to paycheck, but we're not a huge act like the Rolling Stones or U2. We haven't talked about doing [streaming concerts] -- to what end? So we can get publicity, so people can go, "Oh! Cheap Trick! I forgot about them. I'm going to go out and steal some of their music"? What good does it do? But we wouldn't be comfortable playing before a vaccine is out. Different messages are coming out of every corner.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

The toughest thing about the lockdown is the feeling of not knowing what the future holds. The feeling of your whole life being placed on hold. Time seeming to move quickly but slowly. Empty and unused time I don't care for, especially at 70. I'm counting my days. I feel like Muhammad Ali, who was at his prime -- well, I'm in my late prime -- and the years he could have spent boxing were taken away from him. So I try to heed my deceased Aunt Eda's advice. She always said, "Just live every day as if you're gonna live forever." I think she meant, greet each day on its own terms, as an opportunity for life's possibilities. Breathe it in. Let the world open up for you, and prepare yourself to accept it in its entirety, on its own terms, with a vengeance. Well, I'm ready, and I hope you are too. But right now, the waiting... is the hardest part. ( Via SiriusXM's E Street Radio )

PHILIP BAILEY

I can't remember when Earth, Wind and Fire weren't on the road in the summertime. So this was pretty frightening and traumatic. We had our rehearsal schedules and hotels. We were excited about touring with Santana for the second time in our career. I keep thinking about, what if they called and said, "This area feels good about having a concert." I guess I have to just wait and see. [If it's two years], you know what comes to mind? "We're f---ed!" But I can never conceive of not playing music. Right now, I'm sitting in front of the piano. I've been spending this time studying jazz piano for hours and hours -- it gives me much more appreciation for the music I love.  

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