Street-Legal: Dylan Plays the Tarot Card

Year One B.C.E. (Before Christian Era), 1978

I once had powerful dream about Street-Legal. That an alternate version, with just Bob Dylan's voice and acoustic guitar, and it was beautiful. When I woke up, I fired off a quick email to Dylan's office, and asked if such a thing existed, if there were alternate takes, as there have been for so much of his work, artfully presented and curated in the Sony Music "Bootleg" series.

I was told no. And there likely would not be, because of the way it was recorded: Which is live in the studio, essentially, with a large band, many singers, a lot of saxophone, a little trumpet, and no track-by-track overdubbing. It's alright ma, the microphone sound is bleeding so much that, I was told, you couldn't isolate just Dylan's voice and guitar.

Street-Legal (1978), occupies an interesting space in the Dylan catalog. It's almost no place. It was disliked at the time for its cluttered "pop-rock" sound, its hailstorm of background singers--Carolyn Dennis, Jo Ann Harris, and Helena Springs--shouting call and response for six and a half minutes at  the end of almost every line of the opening song, "Changing of the Guards." They shouted loud and often the rest of the album. The sturdy structure of the songs was overwhelmed.

It didn't sound good on our 1978 hi-fi systems. It was just the way Dylan was working at that moment. Billy Cross, who has spent most of his life living in Denmark and was then living in Copenhagen, played most of the really good electric guitar on Street-Legal, which I believe is the only Dylan studio album on which he appears. In the

Ray Padgett

book Pledging My Time: Conversations With Bob Dylan Band Members, (read it on Ray's Substack ), Cross says this about recording Street-Legal:

"I wasn't crazy about the sounds the engineers got. I remember at one point, I was on his case, saying, "Bob, it can sound better, man." He said, "Billy, my records are played by me and the people with whom I'm playing in that room on that day. That's what my music is."

The sound of the album is just too crowded, a dozen musicians, background singers who shout at the end of each line, the lyrics cryptic even for Bob Dylan. Each song has many verses, but few are leavened by bridges or choruses. They just amble on, a litany of complaints and observations without relief. There are love songs noteworthy for their sense of victimization. "True Love Tends to Forget": I know he's Bob Dylan and he knows what he's doing, but I've been listening to it for many years and wondering: Wouldn't true love never forget?

There was a period in which I believed it was one of Dylan's best albums. But there was also a period that I wore a Nehru shirt, beads, and some sort of fake animal horn on a leather chain around my neck. It was a different time than the Street-Legal era, but you get my gist: there were times when my most basic decisions of how to appear in public could easily be second guessed. I still like much of Street-Legal because of its spiritual ambiguities at a very vulnerable time in his career, and as often the case with Dylan, imagery can be intoxicating.

"Street legal" is a term from the automotive insurance and DMV lexicon. It means that the vehicle has all the requirements to be insurable and pass inspections. It's a strange critter of an album. When I started to relisten, I thought it stood alone and apart from the continuum of Dylan albums, that it was unrelated to the albums that came directly before and after it.

But I realized my theory was wrong. It fits only too well in the chronological development of Dylan's catalog. But few people appeared to have noticed at the time, that Street-Legal was really the beginning of his got-religion period, usually thought to have started with Slow Train Coming (1979). Street-Legal can be historically dated as the Year One B.C.E. (Before Christian Era).

Only Bill Flanagan, then with Entertainment Weekly, picked up on the idea of Street-Legal as prelude to Slow Train Coming. Reviewing (and grading) the Dylan catalog up to that point in EW in 1991, Flanagan wrote of Street-Legal:  "Many people loathed this hot dark, claustrophobic album. But songs like "Where Are You Tonight?" are harrowing. No wonder this bleak night of the soul was followed by religious conversion." (B plus)

Street-Legal was released between two live albums: the Rolling Thunder in freefall Hard Rain (1976) and Bob Dylan Live at Budokan (released 1979, recorded March 1978 at the beginning of a World Tour). For reference, I'm only using official releases at the time.

In 1976, T Bone Burnett, Steven Soles, and David Mansfield, key players on the Rolling Thunder Revue (1975-1976), started the Alpha Band. Arista Records is said to have paid what was then oil-sheikh money to sign them. The Alpha Band made three albums: The Alpha Band (1976); Spark in the Dark (1977); and The Statue Makers of Hollywood (1978).  None of them made the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. These three albums, though, are a kind of shadow commentary on Bob Dylan's work during the same period, the studio albums Desire (1976) and Street-Legal (1978). I think they indirectly direct him to the Christian life.

Street-Legal opens with three songs that will culminate in the full blown conversion of Slow Train Coming a year later.  The pained, lucid storytelling of Dylan's 1970s albums, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire (much of Desire co-written with Jacques Levy) has been replaced by the cryptic search for meaning of a broken man on Street-Legal.

"Changing of the Guards" can be exciting and listenable, nine verses of a story that would be a wonderful gospel song if the gospel was based on Tarot card readings. I get different readings every time I hear it. The opening line, "Sixteen years," is immediately answered, repeated, by the singing trio of Dennis, Harris, Springs. (Dennis married Dylan in 1986; they divorced in 1992.) It could also be about Dylan's 16 years in the white light of fame, still unhappy.

Sometimes I think it's about a knight returning from The Crusades; other times, it's more about the Tarot: "She was torn between Jupiter and Apollo," for example. In fact, on the website Untold Dylan, Dearbhla Egan pretty much echoes my thought, that it's like a medeival film set, with different images around each corner, but the presence of Tarot symbols is a constant.

Dylan seemed to be more than interested in Tarot in the 1970s: The Empress card (symbolizing mother, creator, nurturer) is pictured both on the back cover of Desire and in the middle of the inner sleeve liner notes titled "Songs of Redemption" and written by Allen Ginsberg. Referring to the Desire song "Sara," the muse and wife-who-won't-have-him-back, Ginsberg writes: "'Sara’ is profound ancient tune revealing family paradigm--telling Wife and World the last secrets of solitary weeping art: Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel/Writing 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you." Ginsberg is astonished: "Who woulda thought he'd say it, so everybody'd finally know him, same old soul crying vulnerable caught in a body we all are?--enough Person revealed to make Whitman's whole nation weep. And behind it all the vast lone space of No God, or God..."

Street-Legal, the next collection of new songs after Desire, hints God, leans No God.

The final line of "Changing of the Guards" cites "the King and Queen of Swords" which can have negative meaning, according to the randomly chosen Tarot interpretation I found by Lisa Boswell Hendry on her "Divination and Fortune Telling" website.

Some of you may enjoy Tarot and the related field of astrology. I do, to some degree, as entertainment. I'm a Sagitarrian and proud of it. But if I had fallen in love with a Scorpio, might she have converted to Sagitarrius to please my family? Could I have become a Taurus through some triple absolution/rebirthing ceremony if I wanted to marry a Wiccan? My spiritual leader, Rabbi Yossi, says astrology and other forms of divination are not kosher. And devout Christians tend to agree. This goes for Tarot, and others. In essence, on Street-Legal, Dylan is so desperate for answers to his struggling essence that he's dipping his toe into paganism.

The second song, "New Pony," is a variation on a standard blues, which begins: "Once I had a pony, her name was Lucifer." The horse breaks its leg, and has to be killed. "I swear it hurt me more than it could ever have hurted her," the verse ends. No one wants to shoot a broken-legged horse, but it pains the singer to have to shoot even one named after the devil. Like, he's not ready to let go.

Near the end of the song, though, a display of blues-steeped spirit seems a step too far even for our seeker:

They say you’re usin’ voodoo, I seen your feet walk by themselves
Oh, baby, that god you been prayin’ to
Is gonna give ya back what you’re wishin’ on someone else

The third song, "No Time to Think," belongs entirely to a Tarot universe of fools, judges, Mercury, magicians, warlords, queens. It is also broken up by alternating verses with strange choruses, in single, rhyming, nouns: "Equality, liberty, humility, simplicity"; "Mercury, gravity, nobility, humility"; "Socialism, hypnotism, patriotism, materialism." The latter sounds a take-off on John Lennon's "bagism" from "Give Peace a Chance."

There are two Alpha Band songs that interest me most in its possible relation to Dylan. One is related to the title song of the second album: "Spark in the Dark (Or the Moody Existentialist)." 

"The word is blurred/You don't connect the flame with the pain...Your fear is clear, through your magic and mysteries. .. From the sun that burns inside you/Out to your beauty mark/You better look out, for that spark in the dark."

Also on Spark in the Dark is a song called "Mystified": "The occult and pop religions/are creeping in everywhere...You read tarot cards and star charts/you throw the I Ching too/you think you predict the future/but the future's predicting you/It ain't no wonder you're mystified/But God's on your side."

Burnett, both with the Alpha Band and as a solo artist, (especially Truth Decay), made Hollywood writ large, both place and metaphor, as all that was corrupt, hypocritical, and spiritually vacant about American life. He wasn't wrong, and his passionate exhortations about deal-making creeps at the Polo Lounge were often funny and fascinating. It became a kind of signature subject.

Yet he did not find great commercial success until he put together the award winning soundtracks to Coen Brothers films O Brother, Where Art Thou (Grammy album of the year) and shared one of those golden statues of Hollywood with Ryan Bingham, an Academy Award in 2009 for Best Original Song, for "The Weary Kind," from the Jeff Bridges movie Burnett co-produced, Crazy Heart. Burnett, in fact, is one deservedly one of the most respected and honored producers of the 21st century.

But listening to Burnett’s early work about godless Hollywood and relating it to his later success, as well as influence on Dylan, I can't help but think of a scene in the new novel James (Doubleday, 2024), Percival Everett's savvy re-telling of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn story, from the slave Jim's point of view. Jim and another slave, Luke, are talking together in town, a definite breach of protocol. A white man approaches them, but they play dumb enough to make him laugh and walk away, probably to get drunk because they can't.

Luke chuckled. "So, when we see him staggering around later acting the fool, will that be an example of proleptic irony or dramatic irony?"

"Could be both."

"Now that would be ironic."

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