In the rows of the opener “Hurricane” from the album Desire by Bob Dylan Bob Dylan-major covers us over with a flood of eight and a half minutes of narration, making the emergence of a vibrant universe full of emotion and force, to bring the tragedy of the character which she tells in front of our eyes, leaving us right from the beginning without a breath. The ingenious minstrel, with the song of his socio-critical has made public the injustice of the american authorities, in 1966, they imprisoned the heavyweight boxing champion Ruben “Hurricane” Carter for murder– a grave error. The story was brought to film by Norman’s feet are not seen, that has features inspired just by the piece in question for the motif central to recreate visually what Dylan was able to express through simple words. The stubbornness with which Dylan pushes out his complaints and the incredulity with which it relates to the american justice of the time (and with which he has brought to the forefront of the media on the case) are of the same temper of passion and fury that must have tried the “Hurricane”, the solitary man who could be the “world champion”, if he had not had to expend all his energies to fight a battle 16 years in prison, from David against Goliath to “clean up” his name.
Many are of the opinion that Blood On The Tracks is the last masterpiece of Dylan and Desire (from our parents, less familiar with English, sometimes lovingly called Désiré) do not add nothing new, and in most glorify not only a boxing champion but also a gangster in Little Italy in “Joey”: interpretation, a hasty, and wrong, that does not give proper credit to an exceptional album. “Hurricane” is not just a song of dignity to the level of other jewels dylaniani most well-known, but it is also the opener of an album that can rightly be considered one of the works of art of Dylan (and not only the Dylan of the seventies) and his lyrics amazing, but also because of its complexity, the musical, showing at the same time a stylistic turning point and a change of Dylan in his music.
At the end of 1975, already wrapped in the aura of myth – Bob Dylan, had behind it a long trail of masterpieces and jewelry, the first is all the thousands of experiments with folk music during the sixties, but his creative output was immense, and left peace in the fire of his restless spirit. When he returned to Greenwich Village, also thanks to meetings recent and random, Dylan managed to create a circle of talented musicians around him. Despite his gigantic, self-centeredness, Dylan Desire, more unique than rare, grants you total control and leave the reins to others. The greatest contribution is definitely by Jacques Levy – educated intellectual, a scholar of psychology and director in avant-garde Off-Off-Broadway in the sixties – who manages to embroil the earthquake, Dylan, and collaborated with him on seven of the nine songs on the album. Scarlet Rivera – who has almost collected from the road – with the sound of the violin dominates the album: the solos infernal, not only in “Hurricane”, are one of the strokes of genius of the disc. Then there is Emmylou Harris, with his counterpoints voice, to self-sacrifice in the task is definitely not easy to stay behind the eccentricity of the voice of Dylan, sometimes even managing to catch her and to be perfect and thus almost giving the crisis and its charm for a feminine touch.
It is precisely this combination of musicians together to the musical genius and the literary of Dylan to give to the disc its quality and richness. The result prepares a palette of innocent intensity, insistence and eclecticism, above the fundamental, but the most tormented and introverted Blood On The Tracks, that in taking care of their own inadequacy and the pain and the loss of his wife Sarah, he had brought Dylan the respect of critics and fans. In the more immediate Desire, instead, there is a shift toward the mystical on which to Levy with his knowledge of Gustav Jung definitely has a certain responsibility. Dylan tells of misfortunes and tragic as in the epic “Hurricane” and “Joey” , a long dream of ” eleven minutes: the more that the glorification of a mobster, a trip to the side shady of the glorious “American Way of Life”. Silhouette fantasies outlaw, as in the surreal “Isis”, a mystical journey into the unknown with his simbolistico imaginary exotic, that weaves a loss of love with the looting of a tomb in the pyramids, the myth, the egyptian, the betrayal and most of all, of course, desire.
It is useless to speak of the peaks in an album as well: one of the great dark stars of the album is “One more cup of coffee”, the tragic and brilliant elegy, with hints of judaism in which Dylan, along with the Harris, it creates an atmosphere of charming melancholy. “Oh, sister”, a mystical discussion about love, death and god, on the other hand, expresses perfectly the spirit loose of the disc, and sounds like an outtake of Dylan and the sixties. Also the last track, “Sara”, has in its dna the aura of mysticism of the disk, marking at the same time, the desperate desire to restart the relationship with Sara. “Mozambique“, by contrast, seems to be the most pure and carefree. The violin of Rivera and the voices of Dylan and Harris engaged in a charm can gild a piece rather mediocre. Subtle influences bluegrass can be sensed through the poignant aroma from the Latin “Romance in Durango and Black Diamond Bay’, a long hallucination surreal that tells visitors freak of a hotel on an island that is sinking into the sea after the eruption of a volcano.
To the devilry of the music, which radiates a charming flair of the wanderer and arcane would be difficult to capture in words, is an arduous task to escape. Bob Dylan is not only the father of the singer-songwriters, folk, and especially of the literary and cultured, but has also given us, with his style full of ars poetica, a huge contribution to the literary culture. The influence of French symbolism of Baudelaire and, even more, of the “cursed poet” Rimbaud on Desire is undeniable. The extraordinary connection of music and poetry for the rebel with the harmonica and the guitar was often copied, but never equalled: the surreal, tortuous journey of mental and sentimental in the architecture, the magic and unknown of this disk is able to show the stature, unfolding to the full, even to the most ardent disbelievers of the cult Dylaniano.
