Outlaw Blues

Bob Dylan

“Love and Theft” (Columbia)

Performing Nov. 3 at Municipal Auditorium

For tickets, contact Ticketmaster at 255-9600 or www.ticketmaster.com

"To live outside the law you must be honest,” Bob Dylan decreed a quarter-century ago. The line, from his deliriously sawed-off “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” is easily one of the most sphinx-like in a corpus riddled with them. Biographer Robert Shelton notes that it’s often heard as an indictment of oppressive class law, and no doubt that was part of what Dylan was driving at. But he was just as likely also echoing the rallying cry of the outlaw-heroes—everyone from Robin Hood and Jean Valjean to Pretty Boy Floyd and Railroad Bill—that he’d been in the thrall of early on.

As a boy, Dylan often imagined himself in the shoes of one or another “social bandit,” or at least those of some maverick who broke the rules in service of some higher principle or greater good. Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon was surely an inspiration for his adopted surname, and just as dear to him were Hollywood rebels like Brando and James Dean—men who, both onscreen and off, transcended their circumstances and the strictures of society to embody not just a certain nobility, but some deeper existential truth.

Something very much in the spirit of living honorably, yet outside the law, is happening on Dylan’s new album, “Love and Theft”. The title alone hints at high-minded larceny. And from its snippets and filchings of everyone from Dock Boggs, Bing Crosby and The Beach Boys to Milton Brown, The Marcels and Blind Willies Johnson and McTell—allusions as impish and profuse as the panoply of samples on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique—the record’s contents betray Dylan’s intentions outright. He wants us to find the clues he’s left in his wake, and not as mere evidence, but rather as testimony both to his passion for the legacies of his forebears and to the liberties he so often takes with them.

This is, after all, the rake who in “Positively 4th Street” vowed, “If I was a master thief / Perhaps I’d rob them.” Perhaps nothing. As a teenager growing up in rural Minnesota, Dylan aped the outré piano antics of Little Richard; he also mimicked the vocal tricks of singers as dissimilar as Buddy Holly and Hank Snow. After he moved to New York, he drank in the folk blues of Dave Van Ronk and Ramblin’ Jack and, especially, Woody Guthrie, a master thief in his own right. Dylan helped himself as well to the verses of the Beats and the French Symbolists and, upon plugging in, set about plundering the ring-in-a-bell riffs of Chuck Berry, the broke-down shuffles of Hank Williams and the kingsnake swagger of John Lee Hooker. Even his jokes were borrowed, more often than not from Charlie Chaplin or Lenny Bruce.

But what’s always set Dylan’s thievery apart, and enabled it to transcend the mere signifying of his acolytes and peers, is what he does with all this loot. In his oracular hands these objets d’art become liturgical emblems, vehicles for summoning not just the spirits of their creators, but with them, their power to animate and speak to the world in which we live. The Basement Tapes, the abstruse and seemingly hermetic mélange of high times and hard rain that Dylan and The Band coughed out in ’67, is maybe the most glorious display of this conjury. Weary of the road, the limelight and the facile harmony of the counterculture, this fraternity of necromancers plumbed more than a century’s worth of lyricism, lore and legerdemain to remind us that liberty and responsibility—freedom and the weight—don’t just go hand in hand, but are two sides of the same coin.

“Love and Theft” is similarly cohesive—and multivalent, with plenty of the bard’s usual aphoristic opacity. The playing, too, is nearly as “in the pocket” as that on The Basement Tapes. Indeed, Dylan and this band—David Kemper on drums, Tony Garnier on bass, Charlie Sexton and Larry Campbell on guitars and other stringed things, Sir Doug mainstay Augie Meyers on keys—sound as if they’re inside each other’s pockets. Or at least as thick as thieves. Running the gamut from blues and swing to Tin Pan Alley and hillbilly boogie (and with no shortage of Dylan’s compulsive self-pilfering), the music on the record sounds, on first pass, like a summation of sorts, that of a pilgrim taking stock of his progress.

Dylan is no ordinary pilgrim, though, and after 60 years he has plenty of reckoning to do, not to mention every grain of sand in his creaky pipes with which to do it. “I was raised in the country, I been working in the town / I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down,” he reports, in language as plainspoken as its sweep is epic, in “Mississippi.” Dylan sings these lines less with foreboding than with the equanimity of an inveterate scuffler who’s lucky he’s still standing. “Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinkin’ fast / I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past / But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free / I got nothing but affection for those who’ve sailed with me.”