New Morning (1970)

1. If Not for You
2. Day of the Locusts
3. Time Passes Slowly
4. Went to See the Gypsy
5. Winterlude
6. If Dogs Run Free
7. New Morning
8. Sign on the Window
9. One More Weekend
10. The Man in Me
11. Three Angels
12. Father of Night

Notes and Reviews

The musicians: Bob Dylan (acoustic and electric guitar), organ, piano, David Bromberg (electric guitar, dobro), Harvey Brooks (electric bass),
Ron Cornelius (electric guitar), Charlie Daniels (electric bass), Buzzy Feiten (electric guitar), Al Kooper (organ, piano, electric guitar, french horn), Russ Kunkel (drums), Billy Mundi (drums) and Hilda Harris, Albertine Robinson, Maeretha Stewart (backup vocals).




Reviews:

From The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia by Michael Gray:


"New Morning [1970] This 11th album came a bit hastily after the tenth, Self Portrait, and seemed
at the time a capitulation to the huge Dylan audience’s demand that he return to the milieu of
Blonde on Blonde. Lines like ‘The man standin’ next to me / His head was explodin’ / I was hopin’ the
pieces / Wouldn’t fall on me’ (from ‘Day of the Locusts’) seemed a bit written-to-order. And Dylan,
despite all the changes he’d gone through, had never done that before.
There’s much more going on here than this, though. Throughout the album there is a subtle
but sustained falsification of the rural/patriarchal ideas suggested here (and on Nashville Skyline): a
persistent kind of Midas touch that deliberately makes the picture here an idealised and therefore
not a real one. It shows in his going not to ‘the hills’ at the end of ‘Day of the Locusts’ but to the American
hills most artificialised by Tin Pan Alley, ‘the black hills of Dakota’. It suggests Dylan rushing off to Doris
Day; it makes his escape to the hills just a story, by making it just a joke—mere fictional allusion.
(Dylan mentions Doris Day twice in Tarantula.) Dylan’s allusion is defter than that, though, for
the Black Hills of (South) Dakota are ‘Indian country’ (as Doris sings): in fact the state’s best-known
‘great men’ include Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and its major towns include Sioux Falls. Thus
Dylan might be said, as so often on this album, to be invoking a two-headed image, both unreal and
real: the latter a terrain associated with an ancient American culture—and one offering a starkly different
milieu and set of values from those of the honourary-degree ceremony at Princeton from
which Dylan is escaping at the end of ‘Day of the Locusts’. In 2004, Chronicles Volume One implied
that there had been an extra level of allusion at work here too: he refers to the importance, in the
Minnesota of his childhood, of the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, which ‘always came to
town during the Christmas season’, and in which his own ‘first performances’ were seen; he also
says that at around the time of the making of New Morning, the feeling of invincibility that he remembered
from those performances ‘seemed a million years ago . . . a million private struggles
and difficulties ago.’ To know which is to hear a more heartfelt yearning in the lines of ‘Day of the
Locusts’ about wanting to head for those ‘black hills of Dakota’. Just as the next song, ‘Time Passes Slowly’, takes
up the story in the hills, so also it takes up the unreality suggested earlier: ‘Time passes slowly up
here in the mountains / We sit beside bridges and walk beside fountains’, warbles Dylan—and plainly,
as he’s testing whether we’ll notice, there aren’t any fountains up mountains. The very word suggests
the ideal, not the real. It offers a kind of exquisite, ethereal, pastoral conceit: a sort of Greek
mythology-land, an Elysium. Something not there. In ‘Winterlude’ the unreal becomes dominant
and explicit. The title itself implies that the album is all a show, like, in this sense, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream. The rhythm is waltz-time; the cliche´s focus on a dream-world of romance, denying any corresponding
‘real life’ romance—the kind that sparkles through the Dixie Cups’ record ‘Chapel of
Love’ (‘. . . my little apple / Winterlude let’s go down to the chapel’). And it’s not only a waltz: it’s
a skating song. Dylan On Ice. This carries a further suggestion of the unreal: the ice-top as merely a
precarious covering, a sheet hiding and transforming something else. We can see this urged unreality
too in the song ‘New Morning’ itself, with its intentional things-aren’t-what-they-seem touch of
‘a country mile, or two’, while ‘The Man in Me’ has as its theme the message keep-it-all-hid. Then there
is, beyond the obvious theatrical mystique of the title ‘Sign on the Window’, a beautifully achieved
confession that even the wife-and-children may merely be a possible formula to try out: ‘Build me
a cabin in Utah / Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout / Have a bunch of kids who call me Pa . . .’ To
clinch it, this is followed not only by a patently unconfident remark (made less positive still by its
being repeated, as if for self-persuasion): ‘That must be what it’s all about / That must be what
it’s all about’ but then by the capping touch of genius—that intentionally ingenuous little ‘Oh-ohoh-
oh!’ which Dylan puts over the end of the riff that follows. As for ‘Three Angels’, it is a song of
many facets, but what impresses straight away is its being not only surreal (a different kind of challenge
to reality) but as echoing that pop classic of false religiosity, Wink Martindale’s ‘Deck of Cards’.
The ‘real world’ in Dylan’s song passes like a pageant below the gaze of the narrator and his rather
ungainly angels. Dylan’s making them ungainly— keeping them perched up on poles wearing ‘green
robes, with wings that stick out’—is another wry confession of his intent.
The cumulative effect of all this carefully established unreality is to make New Morning very different,
in its vision, from any other Dylan album. It begins to express a new optimism-through-doubt.
He may have little to say but he has the courage to know it: and to make, to pass his time, an intelligent
critique of what he doesn’t believe in any more. New Morning says for his country persona
what ‘My Back Pages’ said about his protest persona."

Best Song: "Father of Night"
According to Alias

Folkrockman is partial to "If Not for You." He also likes "One More Weekend."

Favorite Lyric: "If dogs run free, then why not we?"
According to Alias

"I was glad to get outta' there alive!" -- Folkrockman