Photos: Robert Johnson, blues legend

Time tends to reduce great artistry to caricature.

Bob Dylan -- wasn’t he a protest singer? The voice of a generation? The guy who provided the soundtrack for world peace and civil rights by writing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They are A-Changin’ ”?

And what about Robert Johnson? Didn’t he sell his soul to the devil? At some dark crossroads in Mississippi? And then he invented the modern blues?

But Dylan wrote only a handful of protest songs, quickly realizing they were an artistic dead-end, and Johnson never had any documented meetings with Beelzebub. With Johnson’s 100th anniversary arriving Sunday, and Dylan’s 70th birthday on May 24, it’s time to take a fresh look. Myths aren’t why the music of these two artists still has the ability to bowl over listeners who encounter it for the first time. There’s something else, but what exactly?

To record his latest album, “No Better Than This” (Rounder), John Mellencamp hatched a plan with producer T Bone Burnett. They would set up a mono tape recorder and a single microphone and knock out a bunch of new songs with a small band.

It was old-fashioned recording in the extreme, with an added twist: The “recording studios” were the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga., a sanctuary for runaway slaves before emancipation; Sun Studios in Memphis, one of the birthplaces of rock ‘n’ roll; and the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, where blues legend Robert Johnson recorded.

It all might sound like a gimmick, but the music’s rambunctious charm and playful spirit argue otherwise. It adds up to one of Mellencamp’s best albums, in a career that has seen the former John Cougar move from a Springsteen-lite phase (“I Need a Lover”), find his niche as a small-town storyteller (“Jack & Diane”), become the unofficial voice of Farm Aid (“Rain on the Scarecrow”) and reinvent himself as a folk-oriented singer-songwriter. In 2006, he dropped his long-standing opposition to licensing his songs for use in TV commercials; his song “Our Country” appeared in a car ad and then anchored his final album for a major label, “Freedom’s Road.” But now he’s an independent artist, and he says his days of listening to record company executives’ advice about how best to sell and market his music are over. In a recent interview, Mellencamp discussed his life as a “recovering” rock star.

Shakira: The Colombian singer, songwriter, musician, producer and belly dancer is an international superstar, better known just about everywhere else in the world than she is in America. What’s all the fuss about? Her show is pure, multilingual spectacle, 8 p.m. Friday at Allstate Arena, 6920 N. Mannheim Rd., Rosemont, Ill., $49.45, $80.35, $111.25, $162.75; ticketmaster.com.

Bob Dylan: The bard and his band in relatively intimate confines, with Charlie Sexton on guitar – usually a formula for above-average Dylan. His raspy voice is erratic, sometimes gaining power as the show proceeds, sometimes sinking into the mud, and he’s pretty much stopped playing guitar in favor of keyboards. But he’s still capable of surprising us, and perhaps even himself, with casual greatness, 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Riviera, 4746 N. Racine, $60; etix.com.

Ghostface: The Wu-Tang Clan MC has been putting out excellent slice-and-dice street tales and neo-psychedelic musings on his recent solo albums; two decades into his career, he has to be recognized as one of the most consistent hip-hop voices ever to command a microphone. He’ll be joined by a stellar lineup of talent, including the always cutting and savagely incisive Psalm One, 8:30 p.m. Sunday at Abbey Pub, 3420 W. Grace, $20 and $22; ticketfly.com.

greg@gregkot.com

3 stars (out of 4)

    Bob Dylan arrived in New York at the age of 19 in 1961, and the evidence presented on “The Bootleg Series Vol. 9 -- The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964” (Columbia) suggests that he already knew the impact he was going to have there.

        Within 11 months, he wrote the song “Hard Times in New York Town,” borrowing heavily from old folk songs and transposing their tales of rural hardship to his new urban home. Only Dylan doesn’t sound defeated or depressed. For him the hard-knock life is one jaunty adventure, and by the end he’s triumphant. “So all you newsy people, spread the news around,” he commands. “You can step on my name, you can try to get me beat, when I leave New York, I’ll be standin’ on my feet.”

        It’s the first complete song presented on “The Witmark Demos,” which compiles 47 songs Dylan recorded primarily for the publisher M. Witmark & Sons for the purpose of licensing them to other artists (the set also includes a few tracks recorded for Leeds Publishing, which never fully grasped what Dylan was raving on about). Witmark was an august publishing house founded in the 19th Century that was home to composers such as George M. Cohan and Victor Herbert. Dylan was among the first folk artists it signed, an affront in many ways to the house’s Tin Pan Alley tradition, but the deal would prove to be a lucrative one for both the singer and the corporation. These songs – including early versions of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “The Times They are A-Changin’,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” -- would be recorded hundreds of times by other artists and beoome hits for the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Byrds, Judy Collins, and Peter Paul & Mary.

John Prine (Courtesy of Jim Shea)

John Prine is flat-out one of the best songwriters of the last 40 years, a voice so distinctive that even Bob Dylan is a fan. “Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree,” Dylan said last year.

A scene from "Gimme Shelter."

What are the best rock movies of all time? The question’s on my mind because I’ll be cohosting an evening devoted to the theme Friday at the Pabst Theatre in Milwaukee with my "Sound Opinions" colleague and Chicago Sun-Times counterpart Jim DeRogatis. We’ll discuss our favorites and show clips of key scenes. Mine include those listed below. Further down, you’ll find the rock movies that I definitely won’t be endorsing.

“Some Kind of Monster” (2004): Metallica is led by two opposites -- gruff, macho James Hetfield and garrulous, frequently full-of-himself Lars Ulrich. They fight, their band nearly unravels, and a $40,000-a-month “performance coach” is called in to mediate. Metallica financed this warts-and-more movie, which is either perversely courageous or akin to sanctioning a “Spinal Tap”-like evisceration of your own career. In any case, it’s a jaw-dropper in this era of micro-managed, spin-the-message celebrity.

And here are five rock movies that fell flat:

“Meeting People is Easy” (1998): Radiohead is a terrific band, but this documentary reduces them to dull whiners.    

“Shine a Light” (2008): I suppose it’s silly of me to expect a great movie out of the Rolling Stones at this late stage, but with Martin Scorsese directing I was hoping for the best. I was wrong.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 4)

The first few seconds of Bob Dylan’s first Christmas album, "Christmas in the Heart" (Columbia), sound like something off a Ray Conniff Singers record: sleigh bells, chiming marimba, a choral vocal as smooth and plain as soft-serve vanilla ice cream. Dylan has always had a soft spot for certain creaky-sounding pop styles that predate rock ‘n’ roll. That appreciation manifests itself in a Christmas album replete with signifiers of Yuletide’s past, when Nat King Cole, Gene Autry and Mitch Miller crooned songs of good cheer. Of course, Dylan’s craggy voice isn’t really equipped for crooning, so the sometimes middle-brow orchestration and singing --- particularly the use of backing choirs --- sounds like a misguided attempt to sweeten a dish best served lightly salted.

Dylan invests himself in the sentimental songs, but the selections are highly unimaginative (“Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” “The First Noel”), and his road band (plus a few ringers such as Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo on accordion) plays with subdued professionalism. Dylan and the boys could play this stuff in their sleep, and it sometimes sounds like they do. The album’s charitable intent (all the proceeds will go to organizations that feed the world’s hungry) could explain why Dylan hews so closely to tradition. Rather than mess with the comfort-food recipe, he offers his own modest version of it, right down to the nostalgic album-cover image of a winter-wonderland sleigh ride. Still, the best moments are when Dylan gets frisky, especially a rollicking “Must Be Santa” and a craggy “Christmas Island,” done with a Hawaiian accent. This album could have benefited from a little more of that irreverence.

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Bob Dylan Store

    He doesn't call himself "Jack Frost" for nothing. Bob Dylan -- who produces some of his albums under the pseudonym Jack Frost --- will play a three-night stand at the Aragon Oct. 29-31, two weeks after releasing his first album of holiday songs, “Christmas in the Heart.”

    Tickets ($52.50 plus service fees) for Dylan’s Aragon residency go on sale at 10 a.m. Sept. 12 through Ticketmaster, promoter Jam Productions announced Thursday (Tickets for the shows can also be bought at the Vic Theatre box office, a Jam spokesman says). It will be Dylan’s first Chicago appearance since his latest studio album, “Together Through Life,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard chart last spring.

    It might be a little early for Yuletide caroling, but there’s also a chance Dylan in his new Kris Kringle guise could perform some music from “Christmas in the Heart,” scheduled for release Oct. 13. The album will include standards such as “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Little Drummer Boy” and “Must Be Santa.” Proceeds from the disc will be earmarked for Feeding America, a charity that serves meals to needy families.

    greg@gregkot.com

Photo: Bob Dylan performs onstage during the AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Michael Douglas at Sony Pictures Studios in June. (Kevin Winters, Getty Images)

Sponsored Link: Amazon's Bob Dylan Store

Rating: 3 stars

    Bob Dylan’s latest album, “Together Through Life” (Columbia), is the work of an artist who knows exactly what he wants to say, and how. He makes art that sounds like a conversation, like friends gathered in a room swapping stories with words and music.

    “Together Through Life” marks Dylan’s third self-produced studio release in a row recorded with his road band, each increasingly modest and low-key. Like its predecessors, “Modern Times” (2006) and “Love and Theft” (2001), it presents Dylan’s wreck of a voice in a remarkably warm light. Dylan can’t hit the notes – high, low or in-between – but it almost doesn’t matter.

    Of Dylan’s late-career albums, this is in the middle tier; it’s less a grand statement than a grainy snapshot of a major artist between stations. If nothing else, it affirms that Dylan at three-quarter speed has the charm of an irascible uncle who can tell stories all night long that entertain and haunt.

    Dylan rejiggers the formula slightly: He cowrites songs with Robert Hunter, who was Jerry Garcia’s longtime lyricist in the Grateful Dead, and he beefs up his band with contributions from guitarist Mike Campbell (of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers) and David Hidalgo (of Los Lobos). Hidalgo’s accordion is in many ways the album’s most prominent instrument, and it imparts a border feel, both geographic and psychic. Dylan’s narrators (he claims in a recent interview that all of them are essentially extensions of himself) ponder a blood-stained world with poetic bleakness and black wit. They are caught in the penultimate chapter of a pulp novel, their fates about to take a life-changing turn. As he sings on “Forgetful Heart”: “The door has closed for ever more/If indeed there ever was a door.”

    He preserves the aura of his live show with performances that feel spontaneous. His voice, ravaged though it may be, never strains; he sing-speaks his way through the songs, and the conversational ease he brings to his delivery makes his voice a lot easier to listen to than it should be. The volume is relatively muted, the interplay among the musicians subtle and swinging, without indulging the kind of instrumental flourishes that characterize Dylan’s most galvanizing live-band performances.

    As usual, Dylan is fairly transparent about his source material. His music draws from a well deep in blues and mountain soul, embroidered with Tex-Mex accordion.

        Drummer George Recile brings a Latin feel to the opening “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” which echoes Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac blues-rock classic “Black Magic Woman.” Like Green, Dylan moves in a shadowy underworld that suggests a lawless border town, a back-room card game, a surreal-as-she-goes David Lynch movie.

        On “My Wife’s Home Town,” Dylan travels to hell on the back of Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” The singer channels not just Dixon’s melody, he imparts his own take on Chicago blues, with a deliciously sly vocal, topped off by a wicked cackle as he fades into the flames of a relationship turned murderous. John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen” morphs into the dyspeptic “It’s All Good,” in which Dylan boogies on the grave of a world sinking in triteness. He also touches on French balladry (the now obligatory Dylan-tries-to-croon ballad, “Life is Hard”) and mariachi music (“This Dream of You”).

        Dylan sounds comfortable cruising with this band, repudiating the bombast and the clutter of 21st Century rock and pop. That’s both praise and criticism, because “Together Through Life” never quite kicks into a higher gear. Heard at a distance, it suggests a toss-off from an artist who has done better work in the past.

        He has. But he also has “the blood of the land in my voice,” as he sings in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.” To quote another irascible iconoclast, a man’s got to know his limitations. And Dylan makes the most of his.

        greg@gregkot.com

Pre-order Bob Dylan's new Together Through Life at the Bob Dylan store on amazon.com