Bob and The New Dylans

As one of the ways he makes a living, Andy Whitman writes about music for Paste Magazine and Allmusic. He also has a blog called “Razing The Bar” and last week he posted “A New D****?” Andy contends that Ezra Furman, above all others to whom it has been applied, just might be deserving of the title “The New Dylan”. I’ve read Andy’s work for years and in the past he’s led me to such under appreciated gems as Neutral Milk Hotel. I've come to trust his judgment, so when Andy started raving about Ezra Furman the way he did in his post I set out in pursuit. “He has got, as they say, one hell of a Voice,” Andy explains, “Not much in the way of the vocal kind, mind you. That voice is completely untamed, and often doesn’t bother with trivial little things like pitch.” Being a fan of Bob Dylan, this certainly pricked my ears. I was expecting something akin to early Dylan, somewhere in the “The Freewheelin’” or “Another Side of” era, where the content of Dylan’s songs spent equal time in the silly and the serious, and filled both sides of the equation quite nicely. So off to Furman’s site I went and there I found four songs available. The beginning of “Hotel Room to Casablanca” (MP3) is eerily similar to the intro of a number of Dylan songs in style and production. The guitar is loose and the harmonica meandering, searching but not quite finding the notes it set out to find. Much like Dylan’s, Furman's voice is not unpleasant to anyone in its moments of clarity, but when it goes off in another direction it likes to keep going. The harmonica by nature is an instrument of approximation and should be played with that in mind, and I should also mention that I find it equally annoying when it is played with undue precision. I do play myself (here's a sample) and so I know a bit about the ‘ins and outs’ of the instrument - so to speak. But of all the things I love about Dylan, his harmonica playing has never been one of them. He almost seems to play badly on purpose. When Furman’s vocals begin in “Hotel Room to Casablanca”, the similarity to Dylan is again apparent. But similarity is where it ends. In a number of places Furman doesn’t even strive for approximation. Andy wasn’t joking as much as I thought he was when he said Furman’s voice “doesn’t bother with trivial little things like pitch.” My wife and I have disagreed many times about Dylan. She’s repulsed by everything he does; I argue that, if for no other reason, Dylan deserves a hearing as a master and trailblazer of American music. I want my daughters to know who he is; I want them to be literate about culture that matters. I want them to know that every great songwriter we listen to – from Ron Sexsmith to Indigo Girls to Bill Mallonee – honor Dylan as a both an influence and a guide. Dylan’s voice has never bothered me. I never had to “learn to love it” like I did with Ron Sexsmith’s voice or the taste of beer. But my wife once described his voice as “a cat in heat – ON SPEED!” and I found this amusing. Professional singers (i.e. people who use pitch correction on their recordings) find his voice intolerable. Amateur listeners (i.e. people who want enjoyment from music and not much else) can’t understand why anyone would willingly subject themselves to a voice that, to their ears, is the equivalent of press-on nails on a chalkboard. I am not a Dylan fanboy –and maybe you think that denial proves that I actually am one. But I don’t rubber stamp everything Dylan does. I find his mid-80’s “Jesus period” albums among his worst; his recent output, from "Time Out of Mind" on, is to me only a partial return to the genius of his early work. I saw him in concert last year and after that experience will probably not pay to see him again. So when I heard Furman singing “Hotel Room to Casablanca” I had to revisit my Dylan collection to compare the vocal inflections. My conclusion is that Dylan sings with precision compared to Ezra Furman. Dylan-haters beware: Furman will send you over the edge. Furman even emulates Dylan’s silliness well. In “I Love You So Damn Much” (MP3) he delivers 1 minute and 30 seconds of rapid-fire guitar and blissfully ecstatic words that occasionally break into a snicker or a laugh. Andy ends his post by saying “I moaned a few weeks ago that I had yet to hear a 5-star album this year. I’ve heard one now.” I won’t go that far quite yet, but I admit the more I listen, the more I find to like, and for a 20-year-old kid this is indeed a promising start. Oddly enough, after the above dose of criticism and no doubt much to my wife’s chagrin, I think Furman could yet become an acquired taste for me. Passion can often turn eccentricity into success, and Ezra Furman has plenty of eccentricities for his passion to work on. (Dylan photo credit: Allmusic.com)