Coda: More Ruminations on American Western Mythos, Bob Dylan, and "Pat Garrett"

Since it's Friday and the summer, or perhaps for no good reason at all, I wanted to add another note about Bob Dylan's performance on the "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" soundtrack. This moody, meditative album, so American and artful, has been keeping me musical company this week as I make my way through the mid-July, NYC haze.

The Pat Garrett soundtrack includes the all-time classic, "Knockin' on Heaven's Door", which in the film, serves as the background to the sad, slow demise of legendary actor Slim Pickens's character, as he watches the sunset, a bullet in his belly, and his devoted wife looks on. An archetypal but surprisingly moving moment in the film. The tune, which ends too quickly, but feels like a song that you could sing absolutely forever, besides the great vocals, includes organ by Booker T ("Time is Tight").

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Pat Garrett soundtrack, while its focus is folk and cowboy music, is the Basement Tape-ish aspect to the production, in that it contains three distinct versions of the thematic tune "Billy": Billy, Billy 4, and Billy 7...... In this one tune, the tempo, rhythm, style of performance, and even timbre of Bob Dylan's voice is wildly divergent, song by song, from high-pitched and up-tempo to cowboy-weary-on-the-trail (maybe following seven takes of the tune) that seems to pre-sage the mature voice of "Modern Times" and " "Love and Theft." "

In these explorations of the American West, an interesting link back to the 1970s, where the classic Western cinema and the counterculture finally intertwined, like some double helix. Dylan and the Band represented their own meditations on American music, Black and White, away from the psychedelic era, that seemed to represent an effort to recapture the soul of America through its history and culture, despite what was happening at the time in the Executive Office (sound familiar?) A number of films from the era, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Jeremiah Johnson, Bad Company (the original, about Civil War soldiers on the run), which explored these themes especially come to mind. Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett seemed to represent a more formal rapprochement between Hollywood, the classic cowboy actors, individualist directors, and musicians, who, in their different ways, served as avatars of the popular and countercultures of their own eras. Bob Dylan seemed firmly planted, then and now, in the midst of this creative exploration of "America" and what it means to be "American."