Bob Dylan (19 page)

 

Bob Dylan,
Lyrics, 1962-1985.
New York: Knopf, 1985.

 

———.
Biograph
(Columbia, 1985).

 

———. “Blowin’ in the Wind,” on
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
(Columbia, 1963).

 

———. “This Wheel’s on Fire” (1967), on
The Basement Tapes
(Columbia, 1975).

21 June 1986

 

7) Bob Dylan: “Silvio” (Columbia). A tune by Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead’s writer, but the story isn’t that the Dead rejected it first. The story is the arrangement, which goes back to Bill Haley for its suppression of elision or surprise. Dylan has always sung in country time, with an idiosyncrasy of rhythm and meter only certain musicians could keep up with: when he sings, he invents or he does nothing, but this is far less than nothing. “Silvio” suggests he has so little left of his style he couldn’t make a convincing Budweiser commercial—there’s more musical freedom in the average Budweiser commercial than there is here. Dylan’s music now has meaning only as neuroticism.

 

Village Voice

15 July 1986

 

6) Bob Dylan with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: “Lonesome Town” (Greek Theatre, Berkeley, June 13). “Ricky Nelson did a lot of my songs; I’d like to do one of his.” A lovely gesture, and it worked. As for the rest of the show, Dylan traded emotional nuance for rote chanting so doggedly that when my seatmate wondered if the next number might not be “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” it was impossible to hear what followed as anything else. Two verses later, we deciphered it as a speeded-up “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”

 

9 September 1986

 

9) Robert Shelton:
No Direction Home—The Life and Music of Bob Dylan
(Beech Tree). Shelton published the first Dylan review, and
it turned out to be a hook in his side. In the works for more than twenty years, his book finally arrives at a length of 578 pages, bleeding with incomprehension. Like Myra Friedman in
Buried Alive,
her Janis Joplin biography, Shelton falls helplessly into the role of village explainer. Any sense of play and discovery is banished; the endless search for sources and meanings doesn’t open up the story, it narrows it. Still, Dylan’s conversations with Shelton, from 1962 through 1985 and all previously unpublished, are unparalleled in their sincerity and frankness: they make the book important. So cut this item out of the paper, take it to the bookstore, pull the book off the shelf, flip to pp. 14-18, 24-25, 38-40, 60, 63, 90-91, 109-10, 124, 129, 131, 188, 195, 279, 280-81, 287, 341-62, 479-81, 485-86, 491-92, and have a good time.

8 January 1989

 

This is an obnoxious book, and a very lively one. It’s riddled with misspelled names, misquoted songs, and startling errors of fact (rock showman Bill Graham appears as “the guy who employed the Hell’s Angels to police his promotions”—a complete falsehood), and as many coups of interviewing and research. Sometimes it’s plain that Spitz, author of two other, far less interesting books on pop music, has no idea what he’s talking about; sometimes, as he reconstructs a situation twenty or thirty years gone, you can hardly believe he wasn’t present himself. Absurd potted histories (American youth may have been “politically active” in 1963, Spitz says, but they “were drifting toward the progressive labor movement and away from civil liberties”—the line defies comprehension) give way to intricate, lucid accounts of the sessions that produced the great albums
Blonde on Blonde
and
John Wesley Harding.
Prose full of sneering hype (“And her Italian temper—
mama
mia!
”) or clairvoyant blather (“As Suze gazed over the bow of the ship, out across the tranquil sea, how could she predict the chaos that awaited her back in New York?”) can turn a reader’s stomach, and it can nail a moment—for example, Dylan’s first appearances after his 1979 conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, two solid weeks of concerts in San Francisco. “No doubt fans assumed it’d be like one of the city’s legendary Grateful Dead marathons,” Spitz imagines. “‘Fourteen shows, man—outta sight! Let’s go to ’em all!’ Boy, were they in for a rude surprise.”

After nearly three decades of constant press coverage, at least two previous full-length biographies (one, Robert Shelton’s
No Direction Home,
published little more than two years ago), and more than a score of critical studies, tour memoirs, anthologies, and coffee-table books, the outline of the Bob Dylan story is almost its own cliché: the middle-class Jewish childhood and rock ’n’ roll adolescence in Hibbing, Minnesota, in the 1940s and ’50s; the discovery of folk music at the University of Minnesota, then the blazing entry into the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early sixties. The emergence as the conscience-of-a-generation with “Blowin’ in the Wind” and
The Times They Are A-Changin’
in 1963 and ’64; the shocking abandonment of social realism and protest songs for the corrosive electric drama and paradox of “Like a Rolling Stone,”
Highway 61 Revisited,
and
Blonde on Blonde
in 1965 and ’66, music so rich, performed in concerts so unflinching, that it did not merely reflect its time but truly changed it. The withdrawal from a self-created maelstrom of fame and excess in 1966 and ’67. And the attempt, ever after, through celebrations of family life followed by divorce, through religious fanaticism followed by a surrender to ordinary careerism, to find a voice that could inscribe more than footnotes to what had already been done—an almost quarter-century attempt, by now, to disprove Fitzgerald’s maxim that there are no second acts in American lives. Spitz is the first of Dylan’s biographers to treat this old story as an opportunity for something other than wonder and reverence; to let loose the ambition, cruelty, confusion, and selfishness (“the hard core of selfishness,” as
Raymond Chandler once put it, “necessary to exploit talent to the full”) that shaped the story.

Spitz does so through what, by this time, can be called Goldmanisms, after pop biographer Albert Goldman’s books on Lenny Bruce, Elvis Presley, and John Lennon: extreme reliance on previously ignored (if often marginal) sources, satirically ironic melodrama (“The concert was
religious,
man! . . . what a mitzvah!”), and the insistence on the author’s superiority to his material—his absolute hipness—as means to the authoritative voice. Goldman’s books are driven by a puerile distaste for their subjects, a distaste pumped up into an all-consuming contempt. While Spitz is anything but contemptuous of Dylan, his adoption of Goldman’s manner spreads contempt on everyone else in the tale, heedlessly, pointlessly, as if empty wisecracks were judgments. “High, wide Finnish cheekbones,” Spitz says of Dylan’s high-school girlfriend Echo Helstrom, “siamese eyes, pale, chalky skin, and a full steamy mouth that hung limply and begged for masculine sustenance of any kind—Oh Lord, she was a hot little number!” The Dylan who we’re to think felt these things turns into a bundle of hormones; Helstrom turns into a whore.

When Spitz attacks the ludicrous scholasticism of the early sixties folk world, where original songs were forbidden and the provenance of a ballad was more important than its interpretation, this approach pays off; fools come forth as fools. Half of the time, contempt fades out in the face of a simple, eager lack of respect for the received pieties of the Dylan story. As Spitz draws out memories of musicians who worked with Dylan, the creation of epochal music is brought down to earth, becomes a fascinating account of boredom, discovery, surprise, satisfaction. Then back to ugly nonsense: when, say, in 1975, Dylan gives a concert at a women’s prison—to an audience of “big, black mothers.”

What one can get from this book is a sense of the terrific momentum of Dylan’s life and work in the early and mid-sixties, the period when Dylan made his mark and made a world; no other book captures it so well, understands so well that this is the period that matters. At the same time, one can get no sense at all of where this
transformation came from. It’s as if a young man stumbled on the zeitgeist and, for an instant, falling in just the right way, pinned it to the ground, after which the zeitgeist flipped him over and broke his neck. Spitz can recreate the emotions that brought Dylan to a convulsive performance, but he can’t write about music, can’t tell what happened as the show took place. He can dig up, and make thrilling, untold stories about a black man who introduced a teenage Dylan to the wealth of American music, but give no sense of how Dylan absorbed the lesson. He can render the dangers of the void opened up in “Like a Rolling Stone,” carefully dramatizing unreleased film footage of a junked Dylan in the back seat of a limousine, but he can’t say what a dive into the void was worth.

Spitz’s book is fun; it is repulsive. It’s admirable that until page 233 there’s no need to record that Dylan ever slept with anyone; the horribly detailed night a lonely man supposedly spent with a woman in 1975 is a violation, an atrocity in a book about someone still living—just because Spitz found some pathetic woman eager to trumpet her story, that doesn’t make what happened his business, or ours. So you go back and forth, fascinated, irritated, intrigued, disgusted. Spitz’s book proves one thing: the clichés of the Bob Dylan story are still alive, and the story is still waiting for the writer who can tell it.

 

Bob Spitz,
Dylan: A Biography.
New York: McGraw Hill, 1989.

Spring 1989
¹²

 

When I was invited to talk about pop music and the idea of the open road, the first song I thought of was Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” which came out in 1964. With perfect exuberance and unparalleled
verve, it told the story of “the poor boy,” who sets out from Norfolk, Virginia, with “California on his mind.” So he takes off—and inside a few minutes Chuck Berry and his hero have mapped the continent. The poor boy has to go by bus, car, train, and finally (he can’t believe it) airplane, first class. There are breakdowns and disasters at every turn, but there are always people to help him, and he keeps going.

The best moment comes when he’s up in the air, “working on a t-bone steak” (“à la carty,” goes the line, and you can see Chuck Berry grinning;
he
knows how to pronounce it, but he knows the poor boy doesn’t) and the moment is so complete you wonder why the plane ever has to come down. The arrival in Los Angeles is an anticlimax. Nothing could match the journey the poor boy’s just made.

This is a song of freedom: a get-away. It’s also a song about money: although the poor boy has none of his own, he has friends and he’s never lacking. It’s a song about space: the whole lift of the performance, the singing notes on the guitar, the wild life of the melody, each element is dependent on a big country, a country too big to really understand, an expanse so large and varied no geography textbook can truly explain it. And it’s a song about confinement. Chuck Berry made trips across the country before he wrote “Promised Land”—bone-rattling bus trips on the barnstorming, one-night-stand rock ’n’ roll package tours of the 1950s, with the white performers staying in decent hotels and eating in restaurants, while, in a lot of the country, blacks like Chuck Berry bunked in flops and ate out of paper bags. Berry also made nice, fourteen-hour flights from coast to coast when he went to Hollywood to mime his hits in the movies—but that wasn’t what he was talking about in “Promised Land.” When he wrote the song in the early ’60s, he was in prison, railroaded on a Mann Act charge. He was fantasizing. What would it mean to get away, what would it feel like to see a different place every hour, instead of the same cell every day?

Because as a songwriter Chuck Berry was always a realist, he made the poor boy’s journey troublesome. And though to himself
he was a cynic, to his audience he was a romantic, so he gave the trip a happy ending. And because as a songwriter he knew that it’s detail that makes a song work, that locks a song into a listener’s mind, he had to get the details right—and that was a problem. “I remember having extreme difficulty while writing ‘Promised Land,’” he said in 1987 in his autobiography, “trying to secure a road atlas of the United States to verify the routing of the Poor Boy from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles. The penal institutions were not so generous as to offer a map of any kind, for fear of providing the route for an escape.”

Listening to this wonderful song, thinking about the images of movement and play the American landscape offers, you have to stop and think about the song Chuck Berry would have written if he hadn’t been in prison—about how his version of the open road would have been different if he’d actually been on it. What’s missing from “Promised Land” is control: mastery, the singer’s hand on his own fate.

In the mid-’50s, when Chuck Berry was just hitting the charts, before he had big money in the bank, he never sang as “the poor boy”: just the opposite. He was a
driver.
He had his own machine—first a V-8 Ford, then a Cadillac—and where he went was up to him. “Maybelline,” “You Can’t Catch Me,” “No Money Down”—the road was his. By the end of “You Can’t Catch Me,” he’s airborne: in the ’50s, everyone believed that in a few years cars would fly, and Chuck Berry never missed a trick. But the emotion at the end of “Promised Land” isn’t triumph, isn’t the unlimited sense of release you feel as “You Can’t Catch Me” fades out—it’s a feeling of relief. He made it; he got there; it’s over. There’s nothing left to say. The story is finished.

The fact that the freedom behind this great tale of the open road was a fantasy—a prison cell—tells us something about open road songs: in rock ’n’ roll, they’re fantasies, and mostly cheap fantasies at that. Sooner or later you’re going to have to figure out where you want to go, which means you have to acknowledge that you start from somewhere, that you’re not absolutely free. You’ll carry the baggage of your place and time with you. You’ll never get rid of
it. You can go anywhere only if you come from nowhere, and no one comes from nowhere.