61. Tin Angel

I was wandering up and down a ridge in the Tatras, the mountains that span the border of my homeland and Slovakia. It was the summer of 2014 and I was thinking about Tempest. More specifically, about Tin Angel, and how it’s a pretty damn good song, but could have used a refrain to offset the repetitive band groove. I went so far as to come up with one and, in the days that followed, built a song of my own around it.

The way Dylan and the band never vary from the one pattern that Tin Angel repeats and repeats and repeats over the nine minutes that it lasts bothered me for a long time. I thought that pattern sounded amazing as the song got going, and a lot less so by the time it was over. Why not break the monotony, so that the pattern could sound cool again when you got back to the verse, out of some kind of chorus?

Nowadays, I think that grating repetition is the song’s backbone. It’s a murder ballad, after all, one in which all three principals end up violently killed. And with a groove so baleful, so menacing, so malignant—just listen to the way Tony Garnier slides a finger down that string of his upright bass, like the sinking feeling you get when you realize an anticipated horror has materialized at last—what would you expect but that everyone ends up under the ground? And with a story so unrelentingly hard and violent, that revels so much in pain, why should the music relent? From the moment the character we know only as “the boss” comes home to a “deserted mansion and a desolate throne”—from the song’s opening lines, then—there’s nothing but the one long deadly road to follow, the one endless black river to sail along.

No doubt it also helped that, after my early listens to Tempest, I became a huge fan of Michael Gira and his latter-day experiments in not changing the chord his band is playing until it’s well and truly exhausted (the chord, you ask, or the band? I say: ambiguity intended), which with Swans can be ten or more minutes at a time.

Many of the great singer-songwriters who got their start in the ’60s and ’70s and have lived into their 60s and 70s have shown that a voice changing shape and tone with age may be thought of not as a loss, but as a potential source of new artistry. Mark Knopfler has tempered his conversational style to make it outstandingly expressive, Leonard Cohen allowed himself to sound as ancient as the earth and the stones, Brian Eno came out with The Ship, and Dylan (among other things) discovered just how deranged he can sound if he wants. The sharp slab of glass against skin that is the opening line of Pay in Blood (“I’m grinding my life out,” or, “gragmalaaaggahgh”) is the most famous example, but Tin Angel is the most sustained. All three main characters are edgy people (the narrator too, since he chose to tell this kind of story and so extends and enjoys the telling), and Dylan in 2012 can get everyone’s lines across more convincingly than he could ever have before.

I love the setpiece the song begins with, the boss returning home to find that things have changed, and leaving again as soon as he can muster the required forces. I love how the long, arduous journey is spanned by a single verse, like Steinar of Hlíðar in Halldór Laxness’s Paradise Reclaimed crossing from Iceland to Utah in a line break. “Well, they rode all night, and they rode all day / Eastward, long down the broad highway / His spirit was tired and his vision was bent / His men deserted him, and onward he went.” In one verse he is defeated and abandoned, this once proud man, but indefatigable still, as if pursued by Furies, and in need of the prayers he figuratively asked his servant to “put up.”

He arrives exhausted in—what marvelous, economical mood-setting—“a place where the light was dull.” More worm than holy warrior, he approaches the hut—we’re never told the size, but it feels like a decrepit kind of dwelling—and, in a brilliantly disorienting move from Dylan, like Neil Young’s sudden first-person entry into Cortez the Killer, the man with the “helmet and cross-handled sword … cut the electric wire.” He crouches by some kind of window, like a witch: “Stared into the flames and he snorted the fire.” And lowers himself into the—ready-made grave?—using, and here comes another uncanny detail, out of place, out of time, and yet deep in the mud of inescapable destiny, “a golden chain.”

Verse by verse, Tin Angel bursts with these phenomenal and phantasmagorical details. Many of the verses are nothing but dialogue, as if the song were a stage script, listening to which you have to piece out who says what by yourself. Suffice it to say that the story does not end well and that the leading woman is nuts—but so over-the-top nuts that it’s impossible not to respect her.

The closing verse is, I think, one of the best closing verses in all Dylan. Death breaks the claustrophobic spell and we are back in the world, rather like the world of Under the Red Sky, come to think of it, looking on the main characters from the outside as they are summarily, but not undignifiedly, disposed of: “All three lovers, together in a heap / Thrown into the grave, forever to sleep / Funeral torches blazed away / Through the towns and the villages all night and all day.”