Four years after Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan stepped back into the spotlight with twelve new songs on the album Love and Theft. The title of the album was presumably inspired by the historian Eric Lott’s book Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, published in 1993, in which he analyzed the phenomenon of minstrel shows. These were shows created at the end of the nineteenth century in which white actors blackened their faces with charcoal to perform skits mocking African-Americans, portraying them as stupid, superstitious, ignorant, and only skilled in music and dance. The minstrel shows, as mocking and racist as they were, paradoxically contributed to the spread of black American music, which quickly captivated white artists. There was indeed a “love” of white artists for this black music, and a “theft” by white artists who shamelessly drew on the musical heritage of the Delta.
This thirty-first studio album, which could be seen as a tribute to the blues pioneers of American ballads, is, according to Dylan in an interview with Mikal Gilmore in December 2001, an album “autobiographical on every front”: “The album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation… it deals with great themes.”1 With it Dylan continues the work he began in the 1990s with the blues-folk albums Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, and then Time Out of Mind. All three together testify to the enormous artistic debt contemporary musical artists owe to the pioneers of American popular music.
The album includes twelve songs with various references and influences, including Charley Patton, Blind Willie Johnson, Gus Cannon, the Carter Family, and even Bing Crosby. These twelve songs also mark Dylan’s return to humor, abandoned since the sixties, and an unrestrained and warm tone. The twelve songs are surprisingly eclectic, but successful.
On the sonic level, Love and Theft is radically different from Time Out of Mind. This time, Dylan decided to produce the album himself, again using the pseudonym Jack Frost. “I would’ve loved to have somebody help me make this record, but I couldn’t think of anybody on short notice. And besides, what could they do? For this particular record, it wouldn’t have mattered.”20
Love and Theft was released on September 11, 2001, the day the whole world, stunned, watched the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Despite these apocalyptic events, Dylan’s thirty-first studio album was a great success. In the United States, it reached number 5 on the US Billboard Top 200 and became certified gold. In the United Kingdom, the album climbed to number 3. It was also a critical success, reaching number 385 on Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” In 2009, Glide magazine ranked it the best album of the decade. It won a Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. A great success for an album that Dylan himself called “a greatest hits album… Without the hits.”160
The photograph on the cover was taken by Kevin Mazur, who had worked with Sting, U2, and Michael Jackson, among others. It shows Bob Dylan with a fine mustache, standing with a kind of Mexican look. The back cover photograph, shot by David Gahr (Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Bruce Springsteen), conveys the same atmosphere. The art direction was the responsibility of Geoff Gans, who had already worked on Time Out of Mind.
For Love and Theft, Dylan hired a new team. Among the new musicians on the album were two excellent musicians, guitarist Charlie Sexton (Arc Angels, David Bowie, among others) and banjo player and violinist Larry Kemper (Levon Helm, Donald Fagen, among others). Chris Shaw was hired as sound engineer. Dylan and Shaw had worked together for the song “Things Have Changed” (a single from the Soundtrack of the 2000 movie Wonder Boys). Shaw recalls, “[A]t first, Bob’s manager wasn’t too sure if he’d want to work with me, because I’d worked with Booker T and Jeff Buckley, he thought I might be like an old-school style engineer. But then he heard that I got my start doing Public Enemy records, and he got very interested.”161
Dylan and Shaw agreed on the sound of the album. Shaw: “On Love and Theft, Bob really wanted to get the live sound of the band he had at that time, which, in my opinion, is the best band he’s ever had. Charlie Sexton, Larry Campbell, David Kemper, Tony Garnier, and we had Augie Meyers in playing organ. His idea was just, basically, get the whole band in the room and get them playing. You can never, ever know or predict exactly what it is that Bob wants.”161 Dylan is always in search of spontaneity and hates to repeat himself, as Augie Meyers can testify. “[Dylan] said, ‘I want you to play what you feel.’ One time, though, I played a note, I did a little run on my keyboard, and he gave me a look while we were recording. When we got through, he said, ‘I’ve heard that sound, on “Like a Rolling Stone.”’ And I said, ‘Yeah. That’s where I came from.’ He said, ‘Yeah, well, we gotta do something different.’”162
The recording sessions for Love and Theft were held during May 2001, between the eighth and the twenty-sixth, at Clinton Recording Studios in New York City, with the exception of “Mississippi,” which was recorded at Sony Music Studios. Chris Shaw recalls, “Love and Theft, I think there’s twelve songs on that record, and we did twelve songs in twelve days, completed. Then we spent another ten days mixing it, and I think we mixed four of the songs in one day… And I’d say about 85 percent of the sound of that record is the band spilling into Bob’s microphone because he’d sing live in the room with the band.”161
Chris Shaw recorded Love and Theft using a superb Neve 8068 console. The vocals were recorded using a Shure SM7 microphone with a Millennia HV-3D preamplifier, a Neve 1073 console module, and an Empirical Labs EL8 distressor compressor.