Club Troppo

Kens touching memorial to David Beeton made me think of the new Bob Dylan album, serendipitously titled, Together Through Life.

Those who know the album well will also know that it makes its way to its climax with the great artist at near full, awesome stretch in I Feel a Change Comin On, before he winds up the whole outing with the great belly laugh Its All Good.

I Feel a Change Comin On, which is a further sequel to the transcendent The Times They Are A-Changing, follows an earthy ditty called Shake Shake Mama, which is little more than a pallet cleanser after Dylans wondrous spiritual tilt This Dream of You. This Dream is the only song on the album written by Dylan alone, and is surely his most moving hymn since his hat tip to William Blake in Every Grain of Sand. It is superior, in my view, to Blowin in The Wind (as perfect a piece of work as that song most assuredly was and is).

To return to the point, This Dream sets the stage, after a quick shake up mama, for the climax that is I Feel a Change Comin On. This extraordinary song is itself resolved in two lines that I, like many others, originally heard as:

Some people they tell me

Ive got the blood of the lamb in my voice.

The line could not be delivered more perfectly, more powerfully, and yet, as Christians will know better than me, does Bob really say that the lord Jesus speaks through him? Whoa Bob! Steady on old chap. That is a line humans dare not cross in their own name. I instinctively shrank at the same time as I thrilled to the sound of the delivery.

Of course, I heard it wrong, like many others, for the real line is the title of this post. And then, I thought about it again, slowly, every time that the line returned, which is now already countless. Together Through Life threatens to be the first CD that I play all the way through to the other side, in the way that we used to think needles wore vinyl.

To get right down to it, in fact Dylan does not claim anything at all. He only reports what some people say.  And anyway, he certainly literally does have the blood of his land in his voice. The American Civil War is one of his most enduring lyrical repositories, along with several other bloody storehouses. Yet, if I was an Aboriginal Australian, could not the suggestion that you have the blood of the land in your voice sound as blasphemous as the blood of the lamb to a Christian? And, as I am of Irish Celtic descent, does it not offend my own ancient aboriginal beliefs? The mystical life of the ancient Irish was a place where the barriers between the material and spiritual worlds were never high. For my forebears, the earth was home to a great civilization, an underworld inhabited by the tribes of the Goddess Danu (Tuatha De Danann) and known as Tir na n-Og, or the home of the ever young, the source of Druidic mist, the abode of immortal spiritual loveliness and the font of inspiration, revelation, wisdom, knowledge, poetry and prophecy. To suggest that someone could have the blood of this land in their voice would blaspheme everything my ancients held sacred, in the way that the lambs blood might chill the graves of Christians.

But the meaning rises ever higher, for can we not believe that anyone who opens themselves to the collective culture of the worlds music has the blood of all of us in their voice? Is there any purer way for us poor old often dumb and hopeless human beings to convey the meanings that arise from deep within our souls? Thanks Bob. Vale David:

I know I’ve dreamed you a sin and a lie
I have my freedom but I don’t have much time
Faith has been broken tears must be cried
Let’s do some living after we die