The Very Thought of Bob and Babs
Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan go very deep on an extraordinary and beautiful duet, which our critic reads a lot into
“The Very Thought of You,” the gorgeous and deeply moving duet Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand perform on Barbra’s recent all-duet album The Secrets of Life: Partners, Vol. 2, is striking.
I do not use this word casually. It strikes the heart because it is truly a spray of beauty, exotic and familiar, a great surprise that comes as no surprise (please trust these words, this song will lash you deep); and it strikes through the heart of the listener’s world and their grandparents’ world, too; and it strikes through the history of these two monumental artists and their lost times, lost, lost, lost. “The Very Thought of You” is the Last Post for Der Arbeiter Ring. I believe this, truly, and that is the foundation of this song, which is so beautiful it breaks my heart.
Every song you hear, every song someone creates, is about something much, much bigger. This is not necessarily intentional; it’s instinctual. Every time you listen to a song, every time a song is made, it contains the entire social, historical, and genetic experience of the creator and the listener. An artist may think 180 minutes went into writing a song, a listener might presume 4:44 seconds went into listening to it. That’s wrong. A thousand years created this encounter. The experience of the listener and the creator — both are creative, engaged acts, by the way, even when you listen on the most casual or ambient level — is with us, within us, around us every second: a song heard, a song composed, a song performed, regardless of the lyrical or melodic content, is actually about your father’s time in the ROTC, or your grandmother’s fight with a butcher in Midwood, Brooklyn twenty years before you were born; it is about a teacher’s strike in New York City in 1968, a train missed in Poland in 1936, a cold caught in a Dollar General store in 1993 (and that’s just the 20th century). Neither songs nor your ears are virgins; they are extensions of your mind, your experience, your DNA, and every single thing that made you.
So: I sing Kaddish for a lost world. And yes, this is a record review, too, stand by after channel 2 signs off, bombs bursting in air, here is the late news after the Late Show. I only have to gently scratch my medial temporal lobe and I find the time when there were Late Shows and sad sign-offs until our broadcasting day resumes; and this time also breathes within Streisand and within Dylan and within so many of us, yes? It is the lost forever we only know as the ago. We won’t call it “gone,” we only call it “ago,” that makes us feel better.
And I am also New York City, a palimpsest, a place on earth and a palimpsest, and my people are a palimpsest, the world re-writes its’ resentments again and again on our backs and our chests.
On “The Very Thought of You,” this powerful, enchanting sealskin of a track, Streisand and Dylan duet with a grace and luxury that is gorgeous and weighted, iridescent and timeless but far, far from ageless. Every breath, every phrase, is a mirror, a mandala, time itself. But mostly: Dylan and Streisand are singing Kaddish, for a way of life, a way of listening, a way of working with the gravel and seeds of the present and believing in the fruit if the future, a way of opening the gates to the trinity moments in music. “The Very Thought of You” is a Kaddish, yes, a kaddish for a different kind of Jew who believed in socialism; who believed in The Workman’s Circle; who had been spat on enough in Lemberg markets and high school hallways to know that art was the armory of fury’s fingers and that a song and a singer is the sword of the disenfranchised.
This is key: When Streisand and Dylan were born, 11 months apart, there were still people alive who had fought in the Civil War. Hundreds of them, in fact. They had names like Pleasant Riggs Crump (who had witnessed Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House), and James Albert Hard (who had fought at Antietam, Chancellorsville, and the first battle of Bull Run). Yes. They walked the earth when Dylan and Streisand were born. So when we listen to Streisand and Dylan, we know this: Right now there are people alive who were alive at the same time as veterans of the American Civil War. We live and listen alongside those who breathed the same air as those who fought alongside the half a million who died in the original war of American secession.
When Streisand and Dylan made their NYC debuts, just nine months apart (both in the red-lit cellars of Greenwich Village, filled with sloe-eyed turtlenecked women and sideburned young men), seltzer was still delivered; Bleecker Street west of 6th Avenue still burst with the flower-bloom morning fire smell of new bread; New Yorkers still referred to the subways as the IRT, BMT and IND (and they cost 15 cents); and no man had yet pierced chaste and mysterious space (though, true, a handsome Soviet with one eyebrow nearly wholly missing would orbit the earth just one day after Dylan’s NYC debut. Isn’t this an interesting convergence of history and its’ cadets and comedians?).
Yes, Dylan sang, 15 weeks into JFK’s presidency, and no man had been in space, not ever in history (at least not for another 24 hours). This one last night, this one last cool humid haze of a wet spring night, would pass before a human violated the sacred virginity of the Karman line, intact since we crawled from the sea. Oh, and he sings, exactly one year almost to the day, before the New York Mets breathe the cigar and Rheingold spiked air in the Polo Grounds for the first time; and he sings, and he still sings, loaded with all this, I guarantee you, and it shows on “The Very Thought of You,” the duet Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand perform on The Secrets of Life: Partners, Vol. 2.
And on this night when he sang for the first time in NYC, the Beatles were in the second week of their residency at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg, and the Empress Zita was in happy exile in Switzerland (but more of Zita soon). And when both Barbra and Bob made their NYC debuts, just nine months apart in the Lucky Strike and espresso splashed lowlands of the great city, it was a world where space had not been pierced nor Beatlemania even imagined (as we have established); The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was still on in prime time; and the Berlin Wall was still four months and two days away. Imagine that. That was their world, Barbra and Bob’s world, the news they read while waiting to take the stage in the wine-smelling barrows below 14th Street. Oh, and again, seltzer was delivered, in foggy blue/green bottles in ancient wooden crates. And we consider this world, their world, growing from Ashkenazi roots that pervaded every aspect of their dreams and art, and always would; and ours, too: even if our mind does not remember, our body most certainly does. Not a day goes by when our cells don’t recall shofar and Oppenheimer, the two complimentary terminals of the battery, the temple walls falling and the promise that the temple walls would fall again, this is Titus and Trinity, this destruction is our alpha and omega, ha.
And this is still a record review. There are many, many artists, some extraordinary, some merely ordinary, who have tried to say “something” about America: But this song, just the existence of this song, “The Very Thought of You,” says it all: We are a palimpsest, we Americans, though we forget it quickly in a Real Housewives haze; we touch the air touched by those who touched the air who touched the air; I am a ship out of Lemberg via Liverpool, who are you? We have made artists and heroes out of fools, how are our grandchildren to know who the real artists are? How are they to know that the sons and daughters of the Pale of Settlement were once kind and passionate socialists and the epitome of compassion?
And the song itself — it says a lot, even if we just limit the discussion to, well, music. (But that’s impossible.) Streisand and Dylan’s version of “The Very Thought of You,” a lovely, bruised and hopeful standard first recorded in 1934, is exquisite. It aches but also smiles, it is understated yet gigantic, persuasive yet nearly hushed. Dylan delivers a vocal that is one of his best in years; it is sweet, sincere, cool, and deep, full of all the history and heart that I am banging on and on about. It is full of years and taste and tears, full of years and taste and tears, full of years and taste and tears. It is an exquisite coda to the heart treasure that was Rough & Rowdy Ways, it is the emphatic footnote to that album’s pressured gentleness and grace. “The Very Thought of You” also underlines that Dylan’s much-overlooked, even mocked America Songbook era was some of his most extraordinary work, because like so much of Dylan’s best for 60 years, it reached, it reached and ached and aspired, it challenged, it felt, oh most of all it felt, it reached for stars and imaginary ballrooms and old skating halls where he first saw the stars, and it was honest, and it asked to make time with your heart because first and foremost it made time with his. (Note to you, friend who tolerates this crazy wisdom and are still here: Dylan’s third and final American songbook album, 2017’s Triplicate, is one of his essential works.)
I intentionally did not listen to the rest of the album — that is, The Secrets of Life: Partners, Vol. 2 — because Streisand’s duet with Dylan is so utterly complete in and of itself. It is a palimpsest (that damn word again), an echo of unimaginably crowded train rides across the scarred lands of central Europe; the inexpressible relief of a passport stamped and ferry rides to Brooklyn and even more train rides to Minnesota; it is kishke and herring at grandmother’s table; it is a child, pale and clutching a first primer for Hebrew school, walking past a former slave on the street and dreaming of man in space to pass the time while the rabbi drilled aleph gimel bet, aleph gimel bet aleph gimel bet; it is a parent who told you about Eugene Debs or Henry Wallace or Meyer London, a Jewish member of the Socialist Party elected to congress from NYC’s 12th district, a hundred years before Mamdani or Ocasio-Cortez; it is a Kaddish, a lovely, lovely, sad, lovely overwhelmingly powerful Kaddish, and Barbra Streisand and Bob Dylan are singing Kaddish, though they would not call it that, but they certainly know this. They know this because they are both grandchildren of men and women born in empires that no longer exist (like so many of us are), his grandparents born under Nicholas II, weak and cruel, hers under stately and ever-so-slightly more tolerant Franz Ferdinand. These are the great glacial gorges of history, only just past our fingertips; after all, the last Hapsburg Empress, the final Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, the lovely Zita, only died the same year the Pixies released “Here Comes My Man” and the B-52s put out “Love Shack” (this is a fact); Zita of Bourbon-Parma, crowned Empress five days after Christmas 1916, yet still breathing when Barbra made Yentl and Bob made Oh Mercy. Oh my. History is a great comic and it is the devil, because it convinces us it is only what is standing in front of us. Only the devil can convince us that the pogrom and the Auto-da-Fé somehow went away just because we have an iPhone.
And I say: Aleph, Gimel, Bet, Alpha and Omega, Tin Roof Rusted, and Zita, the empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, still alive when Bob and Barbra were no longer young and I was on MTV, and she ruled under the slogan Austriae est imperare orbi universe, AEIOU, AEIOU, Aleph Gimel Bet, Alpha and Omega, Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash sh’may ra’bbo, and Bob and Barbra, your voices, your presence in the world, remind me to sing Kaddish for the Workman’s Circle, Der Arbeiter Ring, and even I remember the seltzer bottles, delivered to our door, sitting at our suburban table, while I dreamed of Desire, while I parsed the story of Isis.
Note: Der Arbeiter Ring — that’s the Yiddish name for The Worker’s Circle, formerly The Workmen’s Circle — was established in 1900 as a mutual aid society to assist America’s Yiddish speaking immigrants. Throughout the 20th century, Der Arbeiter Ring was deeply involved in the social, political, and cultural life of America’s Jews, especially those in the working classes, and those fighting for fare wages and equality in the workplace. Perhaps this is a presumption, but I think it’s fair to assume that the parents and grandparents of Streisand and Dylan would have been familiar with the The Workman’s Circle; they were an integral aspect of first-generation Jewish life in America in the first half of the 20th century.
AUDIO: Barbra Streisand feat. Bob Dylan “The Very Thought of You”
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