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.”

Dylan flashes tenderness elsewhere on “Love and Theft”. “All I know is that I’m thrilled by your kiss / I don’t know any more than this,” he croons, bereft of irony, to the Broadway soft-shoe of “Po’ Boy.” He gets down and dirty too: “I gotta cravin’ love for blazin’ speed, gotta hopped-up Mustang Ford / Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard.” There are even bits of silliness, notably when Dylan stoops to that loftiest of literary conceits, the “knock-knock” joke. His only regret, he confesses in “Mississippi,” is that he stayed down in the flood a day too long, and it’s with this admission that our hero’s progress eerily starts to take on the contours of our own.

The convergence is all but complete by the time we reach “High Water,” Dylan’s tribute to blues forebear Charley Patton. “Things are breakin’ up out there / High water everywhere,” he moans, straining against what sounds like a throat full of Delta alluvium, as coffins rain down from the sky. Dylan is invoking Patton’s surreal ode to the great Mississippi flood of 1927 here. But as Larry Campbell’s banjo rolls grow more inexorable, the urgency in Dylan’s voice also makes it clear that he’s singing not just about the wreckage of a bygone era, but about a more proximate world gone wrong—our world, and one deluged, even before the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11 (the morning Dylan’s album came out), by tides more insidious and more global than those unleashed by some busted dike.

Of course, from portents about “Masters of War” to slow trains coming, Dylan has been going apocalyptic on us for nigh on four decades now. And he could scarcely have foreseen, or even suspected, what took place on Sept. 11. Yet none of that makes what he has to say on “Love and Theft” any less uncanny or prophetic. “When I left my home the sky split open wide,” he professes, with palpable horror, in “Honest With Me”; later on, he adds, “Some things are just too terrible to be true.” On the subterranean homesick shuffle “Lonesome Day Blues,” he rues, “The road’s washed out / Weather not fit for man or beast / Funny how the things you had the hardest time partin’ with / Are the things you need the least.” And this is to say nothing of his ominous avowals about teaching “peace to the conquered” and being “here to create the new imperial empire.”

On “Sugar Baby,” the album’s oddly jarring benediction, he warns, “You always got to be prepared, but you never know for what.” Many have come to expect signs of such things from Dylan, despite his perennial reluctance to do more than tell us where to look for them. And here, true to form, he admits no answers, even concedes that he doesn’t have a clue: “Last night the wind was whisperin’ / I was tryin’ to make out what it was.” Yet underlying much of “Love and Theft”— even mercurial disclosures like “I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound”—there remains an undeniable sense of solidarity, or at least a call for it, and not so much as an answer to what’s going on as the key to finding one.

“There’s thunder rolling over Clarksdale, everything lookin’ blue / I just can’t be happy, love, unless you’re happy too / It’s bad out there,” Dylan owns on “High Water,” reaching out for his special rider’s hand. Later, in the seemingly slight “Moonlight,” he reckons, “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief / It takes a thief to catch a thief / For whom does the bell toll...? / It tolls for you and me.”