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words. Weberman’s way of hearing, or rather seeing, is more logical, more linear, and perhaps even more correct, but it’s sterile. Mine is not an answer but a possibility, and I think Dylan’s music is about possibilities rather than facts, like a statue that is not an expenditure of city funds but a gateway to a vision.
    If we are to be satisfied with Self Portrait we may have to see it in the sterile terms of the auteur, which in our language would be translated as “Hey, far out, Dylan singing Simon and Garfunkel, Rodgers and Hart, and
Gordon Lightfoot...” Well, it is far out, in a sad sort of way, but it is also vapid, and if our own untaught perception of the auteur allows us to be satisfied with it, we degrade our own sensibilities and Dylan’s capabilities as an American artist as well. Dylan did not become a force whose every movement carries the force of myth by presenting desultory images of his own career as if that was the only movie that mattered—he did it by taking on the world with assault, and by seduction.
    In an attack on the auteur approach, as it relates to film, the actress Louise Brooks quotes an old dictionary, and the quote reveals the problem: “The novel [the film]”—the song—“is a subjective epic composition in which the author begs leave to treat the world according to his own point of view. It is only a question, therefore, whether he has a point of view. The rest will take care of itself.”
     
    Bob Dylan, Self Portrait (Columbia, 1970).
     
    ———. Great White Wonder (1969). The first Dylan bootleg: a two-record set comprised of songs taped in Minnesota in 1961, radio shows from the early 1960s, basement tape numbers, and even a TV performance of “Living the Blues.”
     
    Elvis Presley, “Blue Moon” (1955, first issued on Elvis Presley, RCA, 1956), collected on Sunrise (RCA, 1999).
     
    Louise Brooks, in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By . . . New York: Knopf, 1969, 364.

NEW MORNING
    New York Times
    15 November 1970
     
    Bob Dylan’s New Morning is his best album in years, a set of twelve new songs that hide their real power to move the listener within the bright pop flash of entertainment.
    Many of the songs seem to have been made up on the spot, with confidence in the ability of first-rate musicians to move in any direction at any time. “I know you’re gonna think this song is just a riff,” Bob sang five years ago, being careful to add, “unless you’ve been inside a tunnel and fell down sixty-nine, seventy feet over a barbed wire fence.” The riffs, inventions, and studio jams of New Morning have their own personality—not the repose of Nashville Skyline or the seeming indifference of much of Self Portrait, but the full joy of anticipating the right move and the exhilaration of hitting it square and bouncing off a chord into a new lyric.
    The more carefully worked out songs—“Went to See the Gypsy” and “Sign in the Window” in particular—are deceptive, because they, too, maintain the listener’s sense of the album as a work of effortless music. These songs appear obvious, and while they are not, one is still quite free to hear them as if they were.
    New Morning is fun to listen to. Dylan has never sung with such flair. The record has its own sound, a rich, open rock ’n’ roll combination of Dylan’s piano, Al Kooper’s organ, girl singers, two or three snappy guitars, and some fine hotshot drumming.
    The musicians as a group are at their best on the title song, playing hard rock. The surprising toughness of the cut—which in other hands might have been (and probably will be) just another bland hymn to optimism—results not from dump-truck heaviness but from perfect timing, a jolt of pure excitement near the end of the number, and from Bob’s singing. As the lyrics give us a pretty picture, Dylan sings out the last word or two with a hard-edged vengeance, not submitting to the obvious way to sing the song, but intensifying the