Dylan’s religious DIY in Street Legal
Résumé
Lanfranchi’s article is concerned with an album considered minor and often underestimated by critics, yet rich in mythological and religious elements: Street Legal. Developing some themes already found in Desire, in Street Legal Dylan delves into apocalyptic imagery and Egyptian symbolism. He draws inspiration from tarot cards not only as a repository of images and symbols, but also as a compositional strategy. Songs such as Changing of the Guards and No Time to Think sound like descriptions of a tarot deck spread out before the composer with its succession of juxtaposed images. Tarot cards also symbolise the search for a veiled truth that is hard to grasp in a period of Dylan’s life characterised by change, moral uncertainty and existential bewilderment. The theme of the search is central to the song Señor on which Lanfranchi’s analysis focuses. He also proposes an interpretation of the mysterious subtitle Tales of Yankee Power, traditionally interpreted in a political sense as a reference to American imperialism. The author argues that the subtitle was probably inspired by Carlos Castaneda’s book Tales of Power that was very popular in the 1970s and suggests that the song is the result of an initiatory and mystical experience. The mysterious señor brings to mind Castaneda’s Don Juan, a shamanic figure endowed with the power and knowledge to which the protagonist of the song aspires. In this sense Señor and the entire album anticipate the Christian turn of the next three records and bear witness to a phase of research in which Dylan explored different possibilities offered by the religious DIY of the 1970s.