Listen to This (38 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
In July 1992, a mugger made his way into Cage’s apartment, pretending to be a UPS man. After threatening violence, he took money from the composer’s wallet. It was a weird premonition: on August 11, Cage suffered a stroke, and died the following day. I moved to New York a few weeks later,
and, as a fledgling music critic, attended various tributes to the late composer, the most memorable being the three-and-a-half-hour
Cagemusicircus,
at Symphony Space. The afternoon began with Yoko Ono banging out cluster chords on the piano and ended with a quietly intense performance of Cage’s early piece
Credo in Us,
for piano, two percussionists, and a performer operating a radio or a phonograph. In the final minutes, the hall went dark and light fell on a spot in the middle of the stage. There the audience saw a desk, a lamp, a glass of water, and an empty chair with a gray coat draped over the back.
and, as a fledgling music critic, attended various tributes to the late composer, the most memorable being the three-and-a-half-hour
Cagemusicircus,
at Symphony Space. The afternoon began with Yoko Ono banging out cluster chords on the piano and ended with a quietly intense performance of Cage’s early piece
Credo in Us,
for piano, two percussionists, and a performer operating a radio or a phonograph. In the final minutes, the hall went dark and light fell on a spot in the middle of the stage. There the audience saw a desk, a lamp, a glass of water, and an empty chair with a gray coat draped over the back.
Cage’s last home was in a top-floor loft at the corner of Eighteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, in a cast-iron building that once housed the B. Altman store. Cunningham remained in the apartment, and several years ago I was invited there to dinner. Cunningham was, as so many had reported, gentle, taciturn, elusive, and poetic in even his slightest gestures. The two men had their difficulties, but they were joined by a powerful physical and intellectual attraction. (Yet to be published is a birthday mesostic in which Cage pays tribute to Cunningham’s cock and ass.) I listened avidly to Cunningham’s stories of the avant-garde’s pioneer days, but I found myself distracted by noises floating up from the street below. When the couple moved there, in 1979, Cage made his unconditional surrender to noise: certainly, on that corner, there was no such thing as silence. Yet, as I listened, the traffic, the honking, the beeping, the occasional irate curses and drunken shouts seemed somehow changed, enhanced, framed. I couldn’t shake the impression that Cage was still composing the sound of the city.
That block of Chelsea is not as dangerous, or as interesting, as it used to be. When Cage and Cunningham arrived, the major store in the building was the Glassmasters Guild, which sold, among other things, stained-glass models of Sopwith Camel and Piper Cherokee airplanes. Now there is a Container Store. A Bed Bath & Beyond and a T.J.Maxx loom across the street. At the beginning of 2010, the final glimmer of Cagean spirit left the block when Laura Kuhn, the director of the John Cage Trust, removed the last of the couple’s belongings from apartment 5B. At Christmastime, she invited me over again. Several artist friends dropped in as well. Christmas lights were strung up on the wall facing the kitchen. Cunningham had liked the lights, and had let them hang year-round. On July 26, 2009, at the age of ninety, he passed away beneath them.
Toward the end of his life, Cunningham wrote in his diary, “When one dies with this world in this meltdown, is one missing something grand that
will
happen?” He wondered whether people could learn to live less wastefully, whether traffic could die down, whether manufacturing could return to Kentucky towns, even whether “the Automat could return.”
will
happen?” He wondered whether people could learn to live less wastefully, whether traffic could die down, whether manufacturing could return to Kentucky towns, even whether “the Automat could return.”
Cage and Cunningham’s Manhattan is mostly gone. Real estate greed and political indifference have nearly driven bohemian culture out of Manhattan; “uptown” begins in Battery Park. Cage’s urban collages are almost elegies now; with the mechanization of the radio business, even the piece for twelve radios has probably lost its random charm. But lamentation is not a Cagean mood. If he were alive, he would undoubtedly find a way to pull strange music from the high-end mall that Manhattan has become. He might even have been content to stay in that homogenized patch of lower midtown, where, after a long search, he found his Walden.
“I couldn’t be happier than I am in this apartment, with the sounds from Sixth Avenue constantly surprising me, never once repeating themselves,” Cage said late in life, in an interview with the filmmaker Elliot Caplan. “You know the story of the African prince who went to London, and they played a whole program of music for him, orchestral music, and he said, ‘Why do you always play the same piece over and over?’” Cage laughed, his eyes glittering, his head tilting toward the window. “They never do that on Sixth Avenue.”
I SAW THE LIGHT
FOLLOWING BOB DYLAN
America is no country for old men. Pop culture is a pedophile’s delight. What to do with a well-worn, middle-aged songwriter who gravitates toward the melancholy and the absurd? If you look through what has been written about Bob Dylan in recent decades, you notice a persistent desire for the man to die off, so that his younger self can take its mythic place. When he had his famous motorcycle mishap in 1966, at the age of twenty-five, it was presumed that his career had come to a sudden end: rumors had him killed or maimed, like James Dean or Montgomery Clift. In 1978, after the fiasco of
Renaldo and Clara,
Dylan’s four-hour art film, a writer for
The Village Voice
said, “I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times, the way they did with Hubert [Humphrey], Chaplin, and Adolf Hitler. Just the immutable facts.”
Vanity Fair
was unhappy to find him still kicking in 1985: “My God, he sounds as if he could go on grinding out this crap
for ever.”
When Dylan was hospitalized with a chest infection in 1997, newspapers ran practice obituaries: “Bob Dylan, who helped transform pop music more than thirty years ago when he electrified folk music …”; “Bob Dylan, whose bittersweet love songs and politically tinged folk anthems made him an emblem of the 1960s counterculture …”
Renaldo and Clara,
Dylan’s four-hour art film, a writer for
The Village Voice
said, “I wish Bob Dylan died. Then Channel 5 would piece together an instant documentary on his life and times, the way they did with Hubert [Humphrey], Chaplin, and Adolf Hitler. Just the immutable facts.”
Vanity Fair
was unhappy to find him still kicking in 1985: “My God, he sounds as if he could go on grinding out this crap
for ever.”
When Dylan was hospitalized with a chest infection in 1997, newspapers ran practice obituaries: “Bob Dylan, who helped transform pop music more than thirty years ago when he electrified folk music …”; “Bob Dylan, whose bittersweet love songs and politically tinged folk anthems made him an emblem of the 1960s counterculture …”
PUYALLUP, WASHINGTON. I’m at the 1998 Puyallup Fair, in this agricultural suburb of Tacoma, and among the attractions are Elmer, a 2,400-pound Red Holstein cow; a miniature haunted house ingeniously mounted on the back of a truck; bingo with Hoovers for prizes; and Bob Dylan. He is
announced, with cheesy gusto, as “Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!” He saunters from shadows in the back of the stage, indistinguishable at first from the rest of the band (a well-honed group consisting of Tony Garnier, Larry Campbell, Bucky Baxter, and David Kemper). He is dressed in a gray-and-black Nashville getup and looks like a lopsided owl. As the show gets under way, he tries a few cautious strutting and dancing moves, Chuck Berry—style. He plays five numbers from his most recent album,
Time Out of Mind;
several hits, among them “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “Masters of War”; and something more unexpected from his five-hundred-song back catalogue—“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” He ends with “Forever Young.” The crowd goes wild.
announced, with cheesy gusto, as “Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!” He saunters from shadows in the back of the stage, indistinguishable at first from the rest of the band (a well-honed group consisting of Tony Garnier, Larry Campbell, Bucky Baxter, and David Kemper). He is dressed in a gray-and-black Nashville getup and looks like a lopsided owl. As the show gets under way, he tries a few cautious strutting and dancing moves, Chuck Berry—style. He plays five numbers from his most recent album,
Time Out of Mind;
several hits, among them “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “Masters of War”; and something more unexpected from his five-hundred-song back catalogue—“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” He ends with “Forever Young.” The crowd goes wild.
When I told people that I was going to follow Dylan on the road, I got various bemused reactions. Some were surprised to hear that he still played in public at all. It’s easier, perhaps, to picture him in
Citizen Kane—
like seclusion, glaring at the Bible and listening to the collected works of Blind Willie McTell. Perhaps he does, but he also plays more than a hundred shows every year, crisscrossing the globe and meandering through every corner of the American landscape: big-city stadiums, small-town college gymnasiums, suburban fairgrounds, and rural ballfields.
Citizen Kane—
like seclusion, glaring at the Bible and listening to the collected works of Blind Willie McTell. Perhaps he does, but he also plays more than a hundred shows every year, crisscrossing the globe and meandering through every corner of the American landscape: big-city stadiums, small-town college gymnasiums, suburban fairgrounds, and rural ballfields.
In the fall of 1998, I went to ten Dylan concerts, including a six-day, six-show stretch that took three thousand miles off the life of a rental car. The crowds were more diverse than I’d expected: young urban record-collector types, grizzled wackos, well-dressed ex-hippies, high-school kids in Grateful Dead T-shirts. Deadheads are a big part of Dylan’s audience, and they created odd scenes as they descended on each venue: in Reno, they streamed in a tie-dyed river through the Hilton casino. I asked some of the younger fans how they had become interested in Dylan, since he wasn’t exactly omnipresent on MTV. Most had discovered him, they said, while browsing through their parents’ old LPs. One kid, who had been listening to a 45-rpm single of “Hurricane,” thought that he should come and check out the man behind it. The younger fans didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that Dylan was three times their age. A literate teenager asked me, “Do you have to be from Elizabethan England to appreciate Shakespeare?”
Before each show, for some reason, minor-key sonatas and concertos by Mozart were played over the P.A. system. Male Dylanologists explained lyrics to their girlfriends. “Every Dylan song contains
eight questions,”
I
heard one saying. Bootleggers fumbled with their equipment: a common method of clandestine recording is to attach small microphones to the earpieces of glasses. (Thousands of tapes of Dylan shows are in circulation—the list stretches back to 1958.) Concession stands sold Dylan paraphernalia, including a bumper sticker that read “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”—a line from
Time Out of Mind
.
eight questions,”
I
heard one saying. Bootleggers fumbled with their equipment: a common method of clandestine recording is to attach small microphones to the earpieces of glasses. (Thousands of tapes of Dylan shows are in circulation—the list stretches back to 1958.) Concession stands sold Dylan paraphernalia, including a bumper sticker that read “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”—a line from
Time Out of Mind
.
A boozy group of Minnesotans who sat in front of me at a show in Minneapolis seemed to have the Dylan songbook pretty well memorized. The rowdiest of them was shouting out first lines of the songs at the top of his voice, and once, in his excitement, he crashed into the hard plastic seats. He got up again, blood dripping down his chin, and bellowed in my face,
“Once upon a time you dressed so fine! God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’”
Other fans took a cooler view. Before a show in Portland, I chatted with a levelheaded twentysomething guy who played in a progressive funk group. “Last time I saw him, in ’90, it was
brutal,”
he told me. “I hope he doesn’t fuck up the songs again. I hear he’s better. Even when he’s awful, he’s sort of great—he’s never just
mediocre.”
In Dylan’s vicinity, I noticed, everyone italicizes.
“Once upon a time you dressed so fine! God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son!’”
Other fans took a cooler view. Before a show in Portland, I chatted with a levelheaded twentysomething guy who played in a progressive funk group. “Last time I saw him, in ’90, it was
brutal,”
he told me. “I hope he doesn’t fuck up the songs again. I hear he’s better. Even when he’s awful, he’s sort of great—he’s never just
mediocre.”
In Dylan’s vicinity, I noticed, everyone italicizes.
Dylan is said to make a mess of the songs. He does change them, and fans who come to hear live reenactments of favorite tracks tend to be disappointed. Dylan sometimes writes new melodies for old songs and he sometimes transposes one set of lyrics into the tune of another. He writes a little more each night: I kept hearing fresh bluesy bits of tunes in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which was at the center of every set. As a performer, he is erratic: his voice has a way of thinning into a bleat, and every so often his guitar yelps wrong notes. But he has a saturnine ease onstage. Even from a hundred feet away, his squinting stare can give you a start. And he is musically in control. The band’s pacing of each song—the unpredictable scampering to and fro over a loosely felt beat, the watch-and-wait atmosphere, the sudden knowing emphasis on one line or one note—is much the same as when Dylan plays solo. You can hear him thinking through the music bar by bar, tracing harmonies in winding figures. The basic structures of the songs remain unshakable. There may be wrong notes, but there is never a wrong chord.
In the verbal jungle of rock criticism, Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms. His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or mystification. A book titled
The Bob Dylan Companion
goes so far as to call
him “one of the least talented singers and guitarists around.” But to hear Dylan live is to realize that he is a musician—of an eccentric and mesmerizing kind. It’s hard to pin down what he does: he is a composer and a performer at once, and his shows cause his songs to mutate, so that no definitive or ideal version exists. Dylan’s legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances, over many decades. The achievement is so large and so confusing that the impulse to ignore all that came after his partial disappearance in 1966 is understandable. It’s simpler that way—and cheaper. You need only seven discs, instead of forty. But Columbia Records, after years of putting out bungled live recordings, is finally beginning to illustrate, in its
Bootleg Series,
the entire sweep of Dylan’s performing career.
The Bob Dylan Companion
goes so far as to call
him “one of the least talented singers and guitarists around.” But to hear Dylan live is to realize that he is a musician—of an eccentric and mesmerizing kind. It’s hard to pin down what he does: he is a composer and a performer at once, and his shows cause his songs to mutate, so that no definitive or ideal version exists. Dylan’s legacy will be the sum of thousands of performances, over many decades. The achievement is so large and so confusing that the impulse to ignore all that came after his partial disappearance in 1966 is understandable. It’s simpler that way—and cheaper. You need only seven discs, instead of forty. But Columbia Records, after years of putting out bungled live recordings, is finally beginning to illustrate, in its
Bootleg Series,
the entire sweep of Dylan’s performing career.
Don DeLillo, in his novel
Great Jones Street,
imagined a Dylanesque rock star and said of him, “Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors.” But Dylan has survived without becoming a “survivor”—a professional star acting out the role of himself. He has a curious, sub-rosa place in pop culture, seeming to be everywhere and nowhere at once. He is historical enough to be the subject of university seminars, yet he wanders the land playing to tipsy crowds. The Dylan that people thought they knew—“the voice of a generation”—is going away. So I went searching for whatever might be taking its place. I went to the shows; I listened to the records; I patronized dusty Greenwich Village stores in search of bootlegs; I sought out the Dylanologists who are arguing over his legacy in print and on the Internet. Dylan himself may explain the songs best, just by singing them.
Great Jones Street,
imagined a Dylanesque rock star and said of him, “Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors.” But Dylan has survived without becoming a “survivor”—a professional star acting out the role of himself. He has a curious, sub-rosa place in pop culture, seeming to be everywhere and nowhere at once. He is historical enough to be the subject of university seminars, yet he wanders the land playing to tipsy crowds. The Dylan that people thought they knew—“the voice of a generation”—is going away. So I went searching for whatever might be taking its place. I went to the shows; I listened to the records; I patronized dusty Greenwich Village stores in search of bootlegs; I sought out the Dylanologists who are arguing over his legacy in print and on the Internet. Dylan himself may explain the songs best, just by singing them.
CONCORD, CALIFORNIA. The crowd is dominated by ex- and neo-hippies from Berkeley, twenty miles to the west. Dylan threatens to dampen their enthusiasm by opening with “Gotta Serve Somebody,” the snarling gospel single that had horrified the counterculture in 1979. But he works his way back to the sing-along sixties anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I was sitting near a teenage girl who had first heard Dylan in a class on the sixties and was there with her history teacher.
Dylan’s looming presence in the culture of the sixties is for many a point in his favor: he wrote songs that “mattered,” he “made a difference.”
For others, particularly for those of us who grew up in later, less delirious decades, the sixties connection can be a stumbling block. Until my late twenties, when I started listening to Dylan in earnest, I had mentally shelved him as the archetypal radical leftover, reeking of politics and marijuana. I’d read a story that went something like this. He was born in Minnesota. He went to Greenwich Village. He wrote protest songs. He stopped writing protest songs. He took drugs, “went electric.” He was booed. He fell off his motorcycle. He disappeared into a basement. He reappeared and sang country. He got divorced. He converted to Christianity. He converted back to something else. He croaked somewhere behind Stevie Wonder in “We Are the World.” And so on. If you’re not in the right age group, the collected bulletins of Dylan’s progress read like alumni notes from a school you didn’t attend.
For others, particularly for those of us who grew up in later, less delirious decades, the sixties connection can be a stumbling block. Until my late twenties, when I started listening to Dylan in earnest, I had mentally shelved him as the archetypal radical leftover, reeking of politics and marijuana. I’d read a story that went something like this. He was born in Minnesota. He went to Greenwich Village. He wrote protest songs. He stopped writing protest songs. He took drugs, “went electric.” He was booed. He fell off his motorcycle. He disappeared into a basement. He reappeared and sang country. He got divorced. He converted to Christianity. He converted back to something else. He croaked somewhere behind Stevie Wonder in “We Are the World.” And so on. If you’re not in the right age group, the collected bulletins of Dylan’s progress read like alumni notes from a school you didn’t attend.
The challenge for anyone who thinks Dylan is more than a lifestyle trendsetter is to define those qualities that have outlasted his boisterous tenure as the voice of a generation. So far, the informal discipline of Dylanology—founded around 1970, by a man named A. J. Weberman as he fished through Dylan’s trash on MacDougal Street—has reached no consensus on the matter. At the moment, there are about a half-dozen luminaries in the field. The iconic rock critic Greil Marcus connects Dylan with a homegrown, folk-and-blues surrealism. Paul Williams, who founded the rock magazine
Crawdaddy!
in the sixties, celebrates Dylan as a tireless, generous performer who rewrites his songs at every show. The Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin pays heed to the gospel period and the biblical rants that followed in the eighties. Christopher Ricks, a renowned scholar of Milton, Tennyson, Eliot, and Beckett at Boston University, supplies a formalist reading—of Dylan as a pure poet, who thrives on word choice, rhythm, and structured rhyme. In the same spirit, Gordon Ball, a professor of English at the Virginia Military Institute, has nominated Dylan for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Crawdaddy!
in the sixties, celebrates Dylan as a tireless, generous performer who rewrites his songs at every show. The Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin pays heed to the gospel period and the biblical rants that followed in the eighties. Christopher Ricks, a renowned scholar of Milton, Tennyson, Eliot, and Beckett at Boston University, supplies a formalist reading—of Dylan as a pure poet, who thrives on word choice, rhythm, and structured rhyme. In the same spirit, Gordon Ball, a professor of English at the Virginia Military Institute, has nominated Dylan for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Below the main authorities are the amateur Dylanologists: enthusiasts, editors of fanzines, caretakers of gigantically detailed Internet sites. There is no end to their productions.
The Crackled Bells,
for instance, is an unreadable book-length guide to Dylan’s unreadable book-length poem
Tarantula.
The author, Robin Witting, writes,
“Tarantula
has six main themes: America, Viet Nam, Aretha, Mexico, Maria, and—the great panacea—Music.” I didn’t find much about music, but I enjoyed a note about geraniums: “Do geraniums stand for coolness? Insouciance? Moreover, the odour
of death?” Aidan Day’s
Jokerman,
a book on Dylan’s lyrics, analyzes some lines from “Visions of Johanna,” on
Blonde on Blonde,
and finds in them “a reduction of form to primal elements as—in an image that itself displaces Marcel Duchamp’s rendering of the Mona Lisa in the painting
L.H.O.O.Q
. (1919)—even gender difference becomes confused and human contour and feature are erased.” The text in question is “See the primitive wallflower freeze / When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the moustache say, ‘Jeeze / I can’t find my knees.’”
The Crackled Bells,
for instance, is an unreadable book-length guide to Dylan’s unreadable book-length poem
Tarantula.
The author, Robin Witting, writes,
“Tarantula
has six main themes: America, Viet Nam, Aretha, Mexico, Maria, and—the great panacea—Music.” I didn’t find much about music, but I enjoyed a note about geraniums: “Do geraniums stand for coolness? Insouciance? Moreover, the odour
of death?” Aidan Day’s
Jokerman,
a book on Dylan’s lyrics, analyzes some lines from “Visions of Johanna,” on
Blonde on Blonde,
and finds in them “a reduction of form to primal elements as—in an image that itself displaces Marcel Duchamp’s rendering of the Mona Lisa in the painting
L.H.O.O.Q
. (1919)—even gender difference becomes confused and human contour and feature are erased.” The text in question is “See the primitive wallflower freeze / When the jelly-faced women all sneeze / Hear the one with the moustache say, ‘Jeeze / I can’t find my knees.’”
Despite everything that has been written about Dylan, not a great deal is known about him for certain. Heylin’s chronology of Dylan’s life, for example, is an archly self-canceling document, in that every piece of information points to a larger lack of information. Here are three consecutive entries for the year 1974:
Late April.
Dylan attends a concert by Buffy Sainte-Marie at the Bottom Line in New York. He is so impressed he returns the following two nights, and tells her he’d like to record her composition,
Dylan attends a concert by Buffy Sainte-Marie at the Bottom Line in New York. He is so impressed he returns the following two nights, and tells her he’d like to record her composition,
“Until It’s Time for You to Go.”
May 6.
Dylan runs into Phil Ochs in front of the Chelsea Hotel and they decide to go for a drink together.
Dylan runs into Phil Ochs in front of the Chelsea Hotel and they decide to go for a drink together.
May 7.
Dylan visits Ochs at his apartment and agrees to perform at the “Friends of Chile” benefit Ochs has arranged at the Felt Forum. Tickets for the show had been selling very disappointingly.
Dylan visits Ochs at his apartment and agrees to perform at the “Friends of Chile” benefit Ochs has arranged at the Felt Forum. Tickets for the show had been selling very disappointingly.
What happened during the rest of the first week of May? Where
was
he going when he ran into Phil Ochs? Dylan’s life story sometimes feels as if it has been pieced together from centuries-old manuscripts that were charred in a monastery fire. “Between January and June 1972 the only evidence he was in New York at all was a reading he attended by Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky at the Town Hall,” Heylin writes in his attempt at a full-scale biography,
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades.
A skeptical Englishman who is known for a history of American punk, Heylin is at least willing to admit what he doesn’t know, and his book is the most reliable of several biographies.
was
he going when he ran into Phil Ochs? Dylan’s life story sometimes feels as if it has been pieced together from centuries-old manuscripts that were charred in a monastery fire. “Between January and June 1972 the only evidence he was in New York at all was a reading he attended by Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky at the Town Hall,” Heylin writes in his attempt at a full-scale biography,
Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades.
A skeptical Englishman who is known for a history of American punk, Heylin is at least willing to admit what he doesn’t know, and his book is the most reliable of several biographies.
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