I love everything this man has ever done.
I finished Run River last night, and have now officially exhausted Joan Didion’s fiction. A sad day is upon us, friends!
Where else can I turn for snappy, dispassionate appraisals of broken California rich folk? Please write me some more novels, Joan. No one does it like you.
Also, she was kind of a fox back in the day, in the Ice Queen mold.
Which I have no problem with.
It’s odd timing that I read my first Updike novel two months ago (Couples). I really loved it, and read another right after. He made stringing together beautiful sentence after beautiful sentence in the service of a compelling story look so easy. Considering that he published a new book almost every year for 50 years, I suppose it must’ve been to some extent. Anyway, a true American icon and artist has passed. See you later, John.
On the heels of Todd Haynes’ very odd and affecting Dylan film, we find another example of rock with the volume turned way down.
“Idiot Wind” is the most brutal song on Dylan’s famously rough “divorce record,” Blood On The Tracks. As an album, I’m not sure there’s a more concise example of the pathetic mourning, rose-tinted nostalgia and bitter anger that goes along with (per Pete Hamill’s liner notes) the “inevitable farewell.”
The “Idiot Wind” on Blood is paranoid, ugly, and unrelenting. On a relatively subdued and mournful album, it is a gigantic, neon exclamation point. Dylan’s voice sounds more pinched and nasal than usual - it shakes and cracks, often on the verge of shouting. (The live take on Hard Rain, befitting that records fever pitch, is even more hardcore.)
What I only learned last year, though, is that Dylan’s originally recording of the song (half of the album was re-recorded just before its release) was as a mournful, hushed ballad that virtually upends the songs received interpretation as the biggest fuck-off in history. A few lines were changed by the time of the louder recording, in a uniformly angrier direction, but otherwise it’s the exact same song, albeit rendered with as different an emotion as possible for a lyric which repeated envisions the bloody death of its female lead.
The songs famously harsh barbs sound provisional here, as if he’s trying them on for size but would take them back in an instant if given a reason. One key line jettisoned from the final version finds him surprised and oddly hurt that he’d “have to come up with some excuse” just to speak with the unnamed “idiot” anymore, a perfect encapsulation of the back and forth of romantic dissolution: I need you, I don’t need you, etc.
In great contrast to the toxic final version, here he sounds full of regret - angry as hell and probably ready to take it some more. By the final, louder version, vulnerability had been replaced by a seething, righteous anger (”I can’t feel you anymore / I can’t even touch the books you’ve read”). It’s a testament to the mighty B.D. that the song works just as well either way.
On account of being a bit of an idiot myself, I can’t figure out how to upload a song this big to our server, so check out one of the two “acoustic” versions here.
