Old master's voice puts his new disc on top of the charts

Bob Dylan is justly known as many things - the offbeat poetic conscience of modern America, the man who bridged the folk-rock divide, the man with a voice "like sand and glue", as David Bowie once said, who has nevertheless compelled audiences to listen to him for more than 40 years.

One thing Dylan has not been, though - or not often - is a chart-topper.

So yesterday's news that his latest album, Modern Times, has hit the number one spot in the American album charts came as something of a surprise to everyone from diehard fans to teenage iPod addicts who have barely heard of him.

In its first week on sale, Modern Times outsold offerings from such lesser artists - but brighter commercial prospects - as Jessica Simpson and Method Man.

In parallel with its success in the United States, it also opened at number one in Australia, Norway, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark and Switzerland.

One Auckland music store manager said his store sold out in a week.

Dylan was a perennial favourite, and any music store worth its salt needed to keep a full back catalogue, he said.

"He is one of those artists where you have to keep most of his albums on hand."

Modern Times is Dylan's third consecutive album to impress the punditocracy after Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft.

And the praise has been lavish.

The Washington Post, in an enthusiastic review, described it as "a brooding, introspective album on which Dylan ruminates on regret, faith, romance, chaos, morality and mortality. Not necessarily in that order ..."

Graham Reid, writing in the Herald's TimeOut, gave it the maximum five stars.

Reid enthused: "Dylan at 65 still manages to surprise, confound and - on this diverse album - delight in songs where love of many kinds is a consistent concern."

Its commercial fortunes have to do with a lot more than excited music critics, however.

The songwriter has been emerging from his famously reclusive shell in innovative ways.

He recently cut a television advert for Apple's iPod music player and iTunes online music store, featuring a song called Someday Baby from the new album. That kind of cross-marketing is not exactly in keeping with the counter-cultural spirit of Dylan's youth, but clearly it works.

For the past four months, Dylan has also hosted his own satellite radio programme, Theme Time Radio Hour, in which he sounds off on everything from baseball to divorce.

The show draws 1.7 million listeners a week.

Dylan has been opening up in more conventional ways, too, publishing his memoir, Chronicles Vol 1 and participating in Martin Scorsese's homage-paying documentary, No Direction Home.

Modern Times is Dylan's first number one album since Desire in 1976. That record is best remembered for its coruscating opening protest track, Hurricane, about the wrongly imprisoned black boxer Rubin Carter.

(Ten years later, Carter was cleared of three murders in his native New Jersey, partly thanks to Dylan's campaigning, and was the subject of a 1999 Hollywood movie, also called Hurricane.)

Only two other Dylan albums have hit the number one spot - Desire's immediate predecessor, Blood on the Tracks, which includes the classics Tangled Up in Blue and Idiot Wind, and 1974's Planet Waves.

Overall, though, Dylan has hardly been a dark-horse commercial prospect. In a dense and widely acclaimed career that began in 1962, he has sold more than 100 million albums.

- INDEPENDENT, staff reporter