A couple years ago, alt-country stalwart Robbie Fulks announced that he was going to release a track-for-track cover of Bob Dylan’s 1978 album Street Legal. My immediate reaction was: “But Street Legal sucks. Its songs are rambling and pointless. It kicks off Dylan’s infamous lost decade(s). It sucks.” Then I thought for a moment, looked up the track listing, and realized that I had never actually listened to Street Legal. I’d heard a couple songs here and there, but I’d read of the terribleness of the album so many times that I’d never bothered to listen to the whole thing.
Listening to Street
Legal now, those reviews seem a bit harsh. I don’t think anyone would
mistake it for a top-shelf Dylan album, and if you’ve never delved into Dylan
this sure as shit isn’t the place to start. But it’s honestly pretty good. He
makes you wade through the whole thing to get to the best two songs, but the
penultimate “We Better Talk This Over” would be a solid Drive-By Truckers album
cut, and the closer “Where Are You Tonight (Journey Through Dark Heat)” is
almost good enough to justify its ridiculous title. Certainly it’s
quintessential Dylan: the organ cascades; there are some great turns of phrase;
and Bob sings like he decided to give a shit that day. What else you want? And
there is plenty of enjoyable stuff elsewhere on the album. “Changing of the
Guards” is a much better impersonation of mid-60’s Dylan than most performers
ever achieve; “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” is one of the more successful of
Dylan’s various attempts over the years at frontier atmospherics; and on “True
Love Tends to Forget” he tries to sound like Van Morrison, and it isn’t nearly
the disaster that it should be.
That said, it isn’t hard to hear what Christgau and Marcus
were reacting against. The album is very, very busy. Virtually every track
slathers on horns, keyboards, noodly guitar solos, and choruses of bluesy
ladies upon choruses of bluesy ladies. Jeremy Winograd claims that a big part
of the problem was that the mix on the original Street Legal vinyl pressing was incredibly muddy, and assuming that
he’s right, I can see how that would wreck the whole thing—on a twenty-first
century digital remaster, the band sounds pretty tight, and there’s a lot of
band to hear, so I’d hate to lose that.[2]
Even when it sounds good, though, Street Legal has some core issues with lyrical silliness that a
remaster isn’t going to fix. On “No Time to Think,” a substantial portion of
the lyrics boil down to everyone in the studio singing nouns as loudly as they
possibly can. “China Doll!/ Alcohol!/ Duality!/ Mortality!” A winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature wrote that shit. Also, he wrote “Socialism!/
Hypnotism!/ Patriotism!/ Materialism!” I can keep going if you’d like, because
Dylan kept going for eight minutes and twenty seconds. There’s also a lot of
tortured feminine rhyme (e.g., “travel on” rhymed with “Babylon”—woof), and the
rhyme schemes tend to be a tad fussy by rock standards (there’s a lot of
aabccb). It was 1978, the triumphant moment of punk’s minimalist reaction to
the bloat of corporate rock, and here comes Dylan with a dog-eared rhyming dictionary
and a 27-piece band. It’s no wonder Christgau and Marcus hated it.
*****
Given the album’s less-than-stellar critical and popular
legacy, Robbie Fulks’ decision to cover the entirety of Street Legal in a vinyl-only limited edition produced by Steve
Albini can only be construed as a passion project of absolute and possibly
ludicrous purity. It is one of the more uncareerist moves of an uncareerist
career, which has, since the mid-90’s, moved from a honky-tonk phase to a
countrypolitan phase to an austere folk phase. The “Oh Brother” phase a picker
as accomplished as Fulks could have embraced around 2001 was decidedly
eschewed, as he instead put out a self-released album of
frequently-keyboard-driven narrative experiments called Couples in Trouble (which alienated many of his several fans, and
is also, by the way, goddamn brilliant). Fulks has acquired a small group of
very devoted listeners, and doesn’t seem to be adding many more—when he plays
KC, it’s always the same 2/3-filled indoor Knuckleheads space, and I’m pretty
sure it’s always the same people (it appears he’s playing there June 18, btw,
so if anyone wants to hang out that night, that’s where I’ll be). The Venn
diagram overlap of “Robbie Fulks die-hards” and “people who are down for some late-70’s
Dylan” is no doubt a small group of bookish white midwesterners with
indifferent hair. We should stage a meet-up in a conference room at a Days Inn
outside St. Louis sometime—it would probably be fun.
It’s interesting to compare Fulks’ Street Legal cover album (which is called 16—more on that later) with the recent Old Crow Medicine Show cover
of Blonde on Blonde (which is called 50 Years of Blonde on Blonde, which is
what you’d call it if you wanted someone to buy it). The Old Crow album, to be
clear, is good. It’s a group of talented Americana musicians covering the
arguably-greatest album of rock’s probably-greatest songwriter, and they take
the task seriously and have a lot of fun with it. It’s also a very savvy move:
Old Crow is from Nashville, Dylan recorded Blonde
on Blonde in Nashville, and there’s a lot of new yuppie money running
around Nashville, so why not book the Ryman and scoop up some of that sweet
nostalgia cheddar?
Fulks’ 16 is a
considerably weirder record, and is perhaps inevitably less fun, inasmuch as nothing
on Street Legal is a cover-band layup
like “Rainy Day Women” or “Absolutely Sweet Marie.” But the Fulks album is much
more interesting, and not just because of the degree of difficulty. The opener,
“Changing of the Guards,” is one of the most beautiful, restrained recordings
of Fulks’ career, as Dylan’s horns and backup singers are replaced with an incredibly spare
arrangement. Making Dylan’s lyrics easier to
understand is arguably not to the song’s benefit—it seems to be about exotic
bazaars and virgin sacrifices or something? I don’t have the patience to go the
full Christopher Ricks on it, but Fulks’ recording is so pretty that
it doesn’t really matter.
Another highlight on 16
is “Baby, Stop Crying,” which was one of the songs most frequently
lambasted in the 1978 reviews of Street
Legal. The key difference is that Fulks is capable of delivering the line
“Baby, please stop crying” in a way that sounds like he cares about the
addressee and would like to help them be less sad, whereas when Dylan sings it,
he just sounds annoyed that someone is bothering him with their stupid fucking
feelings.[3]
Or, to be less harsh, Dylan wrote an excellent blue-eyed-soul song that he is
not well-suited to as a singer, but it happens to be right in Fulks’
wheelhouse. It’s not like it’s the first time a cover of a Dylan song has
trumped the original.
Fulks gets weirder elsewhere, notably on “Where Are You
Tonight,” but for the most part he tilts toward arrangements that are either
stripped to meditative quiet, or built on larger ensembles that owe a fair
amount to the originals. The quiet ones are definitely the highlights—they mine
something out of the songs that Dylan didn’t, and they’re also the most in line
with what Fulks’ own best material has sounded like over the past decade.
******
Fulks calls his album 16,
which on its face is kind of odd, though there are a couple interpretations
that come to mind. The first word of the first song on Street Legal is “sixteen,” so it could be that simple. More
significantly, Fulks was fifteen when Street
Legal came out, which means that he may well have been sixteen when he
really got to know it, or, if you want to get technical, Street Legal came out in Fulks’ sixteenth year.
On the back of the album sleeve for 16, Fulks writes the following about his listening habits in the
Seventies:
I had an intense relationship
with the records. Like a lot of teenagers, I’d save my money, travel a great
distance to a store that had perhaps 2000 records, choose a couple, and go home
and play them until memorized. Scarcity and mystery...and the artists played
into them. Certain ones seemed to invite you to connect with them, spiritually.
They adopted interesting masks; their recordings were replete with quirks,
mistakes, eccentricities, holes you could fill in yourself. Eventually, you
owned the music, since you were one of its creators.
That’s lovely. I think I understand what Fulks is getting
at, or at least I can remember that kind of intensive relationship to works of
art, which admittedly in my case was the relationship of an eventual scholar
and critic rather than an eventual artist. Still, obsessive attention is
obsessive attention.
By the time I was a teenager in the early Nineties, the
economics of music listening had not changed much. CD’s were the coin of the
realm rather than vinyl, but that just meant that the local record store maybe
had 4,000 of them rather than 2,000. You still had to save up, and the decision
to buy something was still fraught with risk. You went home and dug deep into
the weirdness of whatever you bought, because the alternative was leaving your
room. My own Street Legal—which is to
say a middling album by a great artist that I swam into neck deep—was Lou
Reed’s Magic and Loss, which happened
to come out when I was fifteen. This is not one of the Lou Reed albums esteemed
by history. Allmusic.com’s ratings put it well outside Reed’s top ten, as does
the Rolling Stone Album Guide, and Christgau’s review consists entirely of
a frowny-face emoji (and this at least a decade before Americans used the word
“emoji”). However, I had picked up the idea from somewhere that an aspiring
rock snob should know of Lou Reed, and Magic
and Loss was the album that was on sale at the Best Buy in Springfield in
1992, so I grabbed a copy.
And the thing is, when you’re fifteen and growing up on a
tree-lined street in southern Missouri, even mediocre Lou Reed sounds like it’s
being beamed in from another planet. It sounds like mean streets and weird
nights and big feelings shrugged off with a snarl of casual irony. Even Magic and Loss—an album that deals
mostly with chemotherapy—sounds like that if you never happen to have heard Transformer. So I think I get where
Fulks is coming from in his fixation on a Dylan album that you could only be
obsessed with if it entered your life at the ideal moment for such obsessions.
At the very least, I know what it’s like to be a hick teenager unaware of his
own drawl parsing the musical ramblings of a middle-aged northern Jew in an
attempt to figure out whatever the big something was that I very much suspected
they weren’t telling me about in school.
Thankfully, sixteen isn’t the last time a person can have a
musical revelation. There were many more to come for me, including the time in
college when I went to an alt-country festival primarily to see the Old 97’s
but stumbled upon a set performed by a gangly, verbose, Buck Owens-obsessed
smartass and thought, “This, apparently, is the thing for which I did not know
I had been waiting.” It’s wild to think that at this point I’ve been listening
to Robbie Fulks for more than half my life. He and I don’t seem all that old,
at least not to me, but there you have it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that
Fulks is my favorite singer/songwriter of the last 25 years (though he’s up
there), but he is the only singer/songwriter I can think of who has gone that
long without ever boring me. And being interesting for 25 years is a hell of an
accomplishment.
[3]
I’m not sure who I’m kidding with the pronoun game here. When Dylan is being an
asshole in the 70’s, the addressee is definitely a woman.
