Bob Dylan (25 page)

 

Bob Dylan,
The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
(Columbia, 1993).

 

———.
The 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
(Columbia Music Video, 1993). The only currently available DVD release is the botched
Tribute to Dylan
(101 Distribution, 2009), which omits the Winter, Reed, and Young performances in favor of John Mellencamp’s hideous “Like a Rolling Stone,” Nanci Griffith and Carolyn Hester’s simpering “Boots of Spanish Leather,” and the oleaginous Richie Havens on “Just Like a Woman.”

Summer 1993

 

7) Bob Dylan: on Guns N’ Roses’ cover of his “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” in
The Telegraph
42 (Summer 1992). “Guns N’ Roses is OK, Slash is OK, but there’s something about their version of the song that reminds me of the movie
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I always wonder who’s been transformed into some sort of clone, and who’s stayed true to himself. And I never seem to have an answer.”

April 1994

 

Reading
Sweet Nothings,
an anthology of poems about rock ’n’ roll, I kept thinking about two scenes in Jim Sheridan’s film
In the Name of the Father.

In the first, the Daniel Day-Lewis character, Belfast petty thief Gerry Conlon, is running from cops and soldiers. As he hurls himself down tiny back alleys, the huge, devouring chords of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” pursue him like a dinosaur in
King Kong.
Hendrix’s guitar might be a mouth with fire coming out of it: his noise, his presence, is all over Conlon, breathing down his back, laughing in his face, tangling his feet. The chase is thrilling, scary, and the music is just right—it adds so much. Still, that’s all it does. The use of the Hendrix tune is a simple, conventional orchestration, the sort of thing you can find anywhere. You’ve seen it before—for that matter, you’ve seen it in a sequence in
The Harder They Come
that uses the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop” on Jimmy Cliff in exactly the same way.

The second scene comes shortly after. Gerry Conlon’s stolid, responsible father has decided to get his good-for-nothing son out of Belfast and send him to London. Conlon’s all for it: London 1974, still full of hippies and squats, drugs and free love. He can’t wait. He boards a ferry out of Belfast, meets a friend. They get beers, drop a coin in the jukebox, and as the first notes of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” come on, they hoist their glasses in a toast to their new adventures, to life in a new land.

Here the music does not orchestrate what the actors are doing; they are orchestrating the music. The chase could exist without Hendrix; this scene could not exist without the sound on the screen. All Sheridan uses is the fanfare that opens the song—that thick, swirling, implacable rising tide of hope and fate, promise
and threat. It’s just Dylan’s band taking its first steps into the song, as Conlon and his friend are taking their first steps; the music is faded off the soundtrack as Dylan begins to sing. The event is so strong, so emotionally lucid, it can take you right out of the story, freezing this perfect moment, this tiny utopia that, over the next hour or so, will be torn to pieces.

There are orchestrations like Sheridan’s use of Hendrix among the poems in
Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry,
as with Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Hanoi Hannah,” where a North Vietnamese DJ harangues GIs waiting for the next attack: “Her knife-edge song cuts / deep as a sniper’s bullet.” When the music is simply used, you get the equivalent of bad rock criticism. It’s the instances when poets make room for a song to make its own claim in a new way that make the book sing, that let it remind you of your own experiences as a listener trying to hold on to one of those instantaneous musical utopias as it vanished. The example I keep coming back to is David Rivard’s “Cures.”

A man and a woman are sitting in their living room, after a fight that’s left them disgusted, ashamed, and bored. They’ve turned the stereo up to drown their own thoughts; for some reason they’re playing “Mystery Train,” “where Elvis relates some dark to himself.” The scene doesn’t develop; it just sits there, like the two people, “each doubt a little larger / than desire.”

The poem goes on, but Rivard has closed it with those lines; as the couple listen to this song of movement, of danger, fear, lust, chase, and triumph, it freezes them, shows the depth of their paralysis. Each doubt a little larger than desire, and the longer each doubt lasts, the larger it grows.

This wasn’t why Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips made “Mystery Train” in Memphis in 1955, presumably: to expose people to their own weakness. But people don’t use songs according to anyone’s intent. In their truest moments, songs, like microbes—without intent, without brains—use people. The real mystery Rivard’s poem opens up has nothing to do with a train; it’s about the way songs enter people’s lives, the way people can’t get them out. Their
beauty, at its most intense, might be more a rebuke than a promise. In “Cures,” it’s the passion and the heedlessness of the music that define how much the two people listening have given up, how much they’ve given up on each other, on themselves—just as the jukebox notes in
In the Name of the Father,
lifting like a curtain in a theater, define the preciousness of everything that’s about to be taken away.

 

Sweet Nothings—An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry,
ed.

Jim Elledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.

August 1994

 

We were driving in the coal country around Norton, an Appalachian mountain town in the southwestern tip of Virginia. The radio was all country music, and it was a bland-out. Travis Tritt, Tanya Tucker, Randy Travis, a crew of smaller names, all of them milking the current formulas of rural references, I’m-your-pal vocals, bright old-timey fiddles, and happy endings—to the point where a snatch of Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Words by Heart” on a convenience-store cassette player stood out as an explosion of passion and pain, of reality.

Maybe it was a bad-luck day: There was no Garth Brooks beyond “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association,” a pastiche of everyone else’s songs. No George Jones, just Alan Jackson’s smarmy “Don’t Rock the Jukebox.” “I wanna hear some
Jones,
” Jackson sang, his phrasing bleeding phoniness, just like everything else he does. The fiddles were the worst. After a bit they were semiotics, not music; nothing was communicated but the sign of traditionalism. It wasn’t simply that one fiddle part sounded like another, doing the same job in every tune. It was as if there were
no people actually playing, as if each part came from the vault in Nashville where they keep the all-purpose fiddle sample.

Iris DeMent would have made a difference. Her prim, neat, and fearful warbles, catching the fear of one’s own desires along with the fear of the world at large, would have told a different story. But DeMent’s music, in which traditionalism is only the doorway to a house you have to build yourself, wasn’t just not on the radio, it was nowhere near it. I gave up and stuck a Dock Boggs tape into the car’s cassette player.

Dock Boggs was born in Norton in 1898. For most of his life he worked the coal mines in the area, save for time as a moonshiner in the twenties and as a professional musician between 1927 and 1929, when he recorded twelve sides for the Brunswick and Lonesome Ace labels. In 1963, at the height of the folk-music revival, he was rediscovered, right where he’d always been, and went on to record three albums and play festivals and concerts around the country. He died in Norton in 1971. He was—as Thomas Hart Benton had recognized from the first, pressing Boggs’s version of the old ballad “Pretty Polly” on anyone who would listen to it—possessed of one of the most distinctive and uncanny voices the American language has ever produced.

On Bogg’s 1927 “Country Blues” a wastrel faces ordinary, everyday doom. The banjo, which as a white man Boggs plays like a blues guitar, presses a queer sort of fatalism: fate in a hurry. At the close (“When I am dead and buried / My pale face turned to the sun”—Boggs worms you into the old, common lines until you sense the strange racial transformation they hint at), the singing rises and falls, jumps and plummets in a rush, as if to say, Get it over with. In 1963 Boggs recorded “Oh Death”—“Won’t you spare me over for another year?”—and you can imagine Death’s reply, which would have been as fitting thirty-six years before, when Boggs was first singing the song. Sure thing, man, what the hell. It’s no skin off my back. You sound like you’re already dead.

In Norton, I bought a copy of
The Coalfield Progress
(“A progressive newspaper serving our mountain area since 1911,” the
year after Boggs went to work at the mines). It announced a talk at the nearby Clinch Valley College by Sharyn McCrumb, who started out writing comic mysteries set in England and now writes serious, complex, spooky mysteries set in the Appalachian highlands, each taking its title from one of the murder ballads that cling to the mountains like the haze that turns them blue. In the first of these books,
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O,
a folk singer is talking to a sheriff about one of the mountain songs, which turns out to be a clue to a present-day murder: “‘It dates from around 1700, but people have always changed the words to fit whatever local crime is current . . . There’s always a new dead girl to sing about . . . Isn’t it funny how in the American versions they never say why he kills her,’ she mused. ‘She’s pregnant, of course . . . So many songs about that. “Omie Wise.” “Poor Ellen Smith” . . . So many murdered girls. All pregnant, all trusting.’”

“Pretty Polly” might be McCrumb’s basic text; in its English versions Polly’s pregnancy is part of the story. In Boggs’s version there is, true to McCrumb’s thesis, no mention of it—but there is something more, or anyway something else. The evil in his singing, a psychotic momentum that goes beyond any plain need to do-this-to-achieve-that, overwhelms the song’s musicological history. As Boggs sings, the event is happening now.

Driving around Norton, you can see remnants of a cultural war, between the likes of Boggs’s “Country Blues” or “Pretty Polly” and the churches and signs that dot the landscape: JESUS IS THE ANSWER, JESUS IS WAITING, or, in a hollow, a modest, somehow implacable white frame house, with three stark crosses underneath the words HOUSE OF PRAYER. Against the lust for escape, for a private exile, that you can hear in Boggs’s songs, the church stood as the nihilist singer’s final temptation, beckoning him to surrender his anger, his refusal, his freedom.

And the war goes on today. Around Norton there wasn’t a song on the radio that would have dreamed of writing a check God couldn’t cash. Except one: high up in the mountains, pressing the radio scanner, Genesis’s “Jesus He Knows Me” turned up. On a
pop station and in its video, it’s a cheap British traveler’s satire of televangelists. Surrounded by the piety, reassurance, and easy answers of this year’s country music heroes, though, it was a shock, and as mean as anything in “Country Blues.” “My God,” said the person in the car with me. “What’s that doing here?”

 

Dock Boggs,
Country Blues
(Revenant, 1997). Recordings 1927-1929. Notes by Jon Pankake and GM.

 

———.
His Folkways Years 1963-1968
(Smithsonian Folkways, 1998). Notes by Mike Seeger and Barry O’Connell.

 

Sharyn McCrumb,
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O
(1990). New York: Ballantine, 1991, 161.

February 1995

 

5) James Marsh, director:
Highway 61 Revisited
(Arena Television/BBC, 1993). Part of a “Tales of Rock ’n’ Roll” series unseen in the U.S., this one-hour documentary—“a biography of a song”—focuses on one of Bob Dylan’s most inspired recordings and the spine-of-the-nation highway it’s named for. There are surprises everywhere: “Blind Willie McTell” orchestrates footage of Civil Rights demonstrations, a specter dissolving the words of heroes; a rough, clanking piano demo of “Like a Rolling Stone” turns into the anthem everyone knows as New York City looms up; Dylan’s old buddy John Bucklen shares high-school tapes. Bucklen and then Bobby Zimmerman talk into the tape recorder self-consciously, as if they know someday we’ll be listening, judging whether Dylan’s claim that Johnny Cash is more boring than dirt, or that Elvis was a thief, sounds convincing (not completely).

Dylan hammers out Little Richard’s “Jenny, Jenny” on the piano. He sings “Little Richard”—the song. His song. Good, too.

 

“Little Richard,” “Jenny, Jenny,” and twelve other segments from tapes made by John Bucklen in Hibbing, Minnesota, in 1958, can be found on
I Was So Much Younger Then
(Dandelion bootleg).

March 1995

 

I admit I was thrown by the Bob Dylan segment of the NBC News end-of-the-year wrap-up on December 30. After the requisite Bobbits-Simpson-Tonya-Michael Jackson montage, and a similar smear of Rwanda-Bosnia-Haiti-Chechnya, there was bright footage of Newt Gingrich and other Republican stalwarts celebrating their November triumph—with Dylan’s 1964 recording of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (“Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway / Don’t block up the hall”) churning in the background. Despite Gingrich’s immediate post-election identification of the seemingly long-gone counterculture as the enemy within, the song sounded so weirdly apt it was as if the Republicans had now seized all rights to it, along with the rest of the country. The NBC orchestration conflated all too perfectly with the new TV commercial Taco Bell began running about the same time, announcing a burrito-plus-CD promotion (you can pick up a sampler with General Public, Cracker, the Spin Doctors: “Some call it ‘alternative’ or ‘new rock’—we just call it ‘dinner music’”) with footage of happy young people turning Taco Bells into dance clubs. “Don’t let it pass you by,” said the announcer in a friendly voice, which suddenly, unexpectedly, turned hard: “Because there is . . . no alternative.”