Bob Dylan - Summer Days

The first official day of summer may not be until June 21st but here in southern California it's so miserably hot I'm already dreaming of the fall. I don't deal well with hot weather, I guess it's the Minnesota in my blood. I hate summer clothes, shorts and tanktops and sandals, I hate the beach, I hate sweaty and sticky and smoggy. The only thing I do like about summer is the songs. Summer always inspires great music, or maybe summer just makes certain songs better. There's something about 90 degree weather and driving with the windows down and the AC up that elevates songs like "Hot In Herre" by Nelly or "Summertime" by Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff (two artists I don't exactly regularly listen to) into blissful territory. I'm already anxiously anticipating what the summer anthem will be this year. Will Jay-Z step out of retirement again to hold us down for another summer? But while I'm waiting for that song to drop, here's one of my favorite summer songs from another guy with Minnesota roots.

I felt a little weird in my last post, talking about Bob Dylan and not posting a song by the man himself, so here's an attempt to rectify that. "Summer Days", in addition to being my favorite track off Dylan's last studio album Love and Theft, perfectly captures a wonderful muggy July rockabilly barbeque vibe. Love and Theft was given generally positive reviews when it was released in 2001 but perhaps the fact that it came out on September 11 of that year led to it not really getting the critical analysis that it deserved. The basic consensus seemed to be that it was another decent Dylan album, fun to listen to but not as good as Time Out Of Mind, and of course not as good as his 60s output. But music critics are mostly idiots, so while the rest of the world is waiting for Dylan to write another "Like A Rolling Stone" I'd prefer to focus on what he's doing now, because I find it just as exciting and important as any other point in his career.

Dylan left plenty of clues for the critics to understand what he was doing, the album is called Love and Theft after all, but I don't think most people got it. While any of his contemporaries that are still alive are putting out crap albums and then touring on the coattails of hits written decades ago, Dylan is still trying new things and still writing great songs. Love and Theft is a postmodern tour of American music, stealing bits of blues, folk, gospel, rock and roll and fusing it together with Dylan's ever cantankerous wit. People that think Dylan doesn't write as well as he used to because he's not writing about political issues or psychedelic drug metaphors aren't paying attention. The lyrics of "Summer Days" appear simple and direct but each line is drenched in subtext. And the delivery of course is key. Dylan wasn't exactly blessed with the prettiest voice in the world, and years of smoking have ravaged an already rough tone into a weird Muppet-ish scratch, but he knows how to use what he's got. He can't do any melismatic runs, but he can sneer a clever line better than anybody. Listen to the winking "She said you can't repeat the past/I said you can't?/what do you mean you can't?/Of course you can" and tell me this man is not still a genius.

That line in particular was plucked out in a lot of reviews, but the point was always missed. Dylan's repeating the past alright, but not his past. He's never going to repeat his past no matter how badly old hippies and baby boomers want him to. He continues to do whatever he wants and he could care less what the rest of the world's expectations of him are. And maybe I can get down with Dylan's newer work because I sense his kindred music nerdness. (Check out the playlists of Dylan's radio show on XM satellite radio, it's amazing.) Here he's repeating the past of Charlie Patton, Leadbelly, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie; an entire century's worth of musical visionaries, and filtering it through his unique lyrical eye. The result is something different and new that feels familiar. "Summer Days" sounds like a swinging rockabilly song that could have been written in the 50s (credit the production, by Dylan himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost, for that) but it's got lyrics that you'd never hear Carl Perkins singing. Kind of like how this song feels like summer for me, but it's a summer that only exists in my imagination. And I kind of like it better that way.

(Click here to buy Love and Theft on Amazon.)