Night Beat (10 page)

BACK AGAIN to 1986—when I speak with Dylan during his recording sessions for what would become, in part, his
Knocked Out Loaded
and
Down in the Groove
albums. At that time, Dylan is in the midst of a period of high activity. For one thing, there’s been his participation in the pop world’s increased spate of political and social activism, including his involvement in the USA for Africa and Artists United Against Apartheid projects and his appearance at the Live Aid and Farm Aid programs (the latter, an event inspired by an off-the-cuff remark Dylan had made at Live Aid). More important, there were intriguing indications in 1983’s
Infidels
and 1985’s
Empire Burlesque
that the singer seemed interested in working his way back into the concerns of the real-life modern world. The latter album, in particular, plays as an artful attempt at adapting his music to recent advancements in pop sound, style, and technology. Yet the album’s most affecting song, “Dark Eyes,” is also Dylan’s simplest, most ancient-sounding track in years. “Dark Eyes” is a statement of conscience, emotional distance, and moral divergence, and Dylan plays it straight from the heart—just his own voice, guitar, and harmony carrying the reverie, as if it were a dark madrigal. Over wistful staccato chords, and in a lovely high voice, Dylan looks back and ahead at the same time, and directly into the specter of unforgettable memories that seem indivisible from an uncertain future. “I live in another world,” he sings, “where life and death are memorized . . . /Oh time is short and the days are sweet and passion rules the arrow that flies/A million faces at my feet but all I see are dark eyes.” In the mid-1980s, “Dark Eyes” sounds to me like the music Bob Dylan might yet make, when he would again care enough to forget the vagaries and vogues of the modern pop scene.

Of course, Dylan has his own views about all this talk of decline and renewal. A little later in the evening at the Topanga studio, while various musicians are working on overdubs, he sits in a quiet office, fiddling with one of his ever-present cigarettes and taking occasional sips from a plastic cup filled with white wine. We are discussing a column that appeared in the April issue of
Artforum,
by critic Greil Marcus. Marcus has covered Dylan frequently over the years, but in 1986 he is less than compelled by the artist’s recent output. Commenting on Dylan’s career, and about a recent five-LP retrospective of Dylan’s music,
Biograph,
Marcus wrote: “Dylan actually did something between 1963 and 1968, and . . . what he did then created a standard against which everything he has putatively done since can be measured. . . . The fact that the 1964 ’It Ain’t Me, Babe’ can be placed on an album next to the 1974 ’You Angel You’ is a denial of everyone’s best hopes.”

Dylan seems intrigued by Marcus’s comments, but also amused. “Well, he’s right and he’s wrong,” he says. “I did that accidentally. That was all accidental, as every age is. You’re doing something, you don’t know what it is, you’re just doing it. And later on you’ll look at it and . . . ” His words trail off, then he begins again. “To me, I don’t have a ’career.’ . . . A career is something you can look back on, and I’m not ready to look back. Time doesn’t really exist for me in those kinds of terms. I don’t really remember in any monumental way ’what I have done.’ This isn’t my career; this is my life, and it’s still vital to me.

“I mean, I never really dwell on myself too much in terms of what I’ve
done.
For one thing, so much of it went by in such a flash, it’s hard for me to focus on. I was once offered a great deal of money for an autobiography, and I thought about it for a minute, then I decided I wasn’t ready. I have to be sat down and have this stuff drawn out of me, because on my own I wouldn’t think about these things. You just go ahead and you live your life and you move on to the next thing, and when it’s all said and done, the historians can figure it out. That’s the way I look at it.”

He removes his sunglasses and rubs at his eyes. “I feel like I really don’t want to prove any points,” he continues. “I just want to do whatever it is I do. These lyrical things that come off in a unique or a desolate sort of way, I don’t know, I don’t feel I have to put that out anymore to please anybody. Besides, anything you want to do for posterity’s sake, you can just sing into a tape recorder and give it to your mother, you know?”

Dylan laughs at his last remark. “See,” he says, “somebody once told me—and I don’t remember who it was or even where it was—but they said,
’Never
give a hundred percent.’ My thing has always been just getting by on whatever I’ve been getting by on. That applies to that time, too, that time in the sixties. It never really occurred to me that I had to do it for any kind of motive except that I just felt like I wanted to do it. As things worked, I mean, I could never have predicted it.”

I tell him it’s hard to believe he wasn’t giving a hundred percent on
Highway 61 Revisited
or
Blonde on Blonde.

He flashes a shy grin and shrugs. “Well, maybe I was. But there’s something at the back of your mind that says, ’I’m not giving you a hundred percent. I’m not giving
anybody
a hundred percent. I’m gonna give you this much, and this much is gonna have to do. I’m good at what I do. I can afford to give you this much and still be as good as, if not better than, the guy over across the street.’ I’m not gonna give it all—I’m not Judy Garland, who’s gonna die onstage in front of a thousand clowns. If we’ve learned anything, we should have learned that.”

A moment later an engineer is standing in the doorway, telling Dylan the overdubs are done. “This is all gonna pass,” Dylan says before getting up to go back into the studio. “All these people who say whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing—that’s all gonna pass, because, obviously, I’m not gonna be around forever. That day’s gonna come when there aren’t gonna be any more records, and then people won’t be able to say, ’Well
this
one’s not as good as the last one.’ They’re gonna have to look at it all. And I don’t know what the picture will be, what people’s judgment will be at that time. I can’t help you in that area.”

TWO WEEKS LATER, Bob Dylan sits on a dog-eared sofa in the Van Nuys studio where Tom Petty is working, sipping at a plastic cup full of whiskey and water. He blows a curt puff of smoke and broods over it. His weary air reminds me of something he’d said earlier: “Man, sometimes it seems I’ve spent half my life in a recording studio. . . . It’s like living in a coal mine.”

Dylan and Petty have been holed up in this room the better part of the night, working on a track called “Got My Mind Made Up,” which they have co-written for Dylan’s album. By all appearances, it’s been a productive session: The tune is a walloping, Bo Diddley-like raveup with Delta blues-style slide guitar, and Dylan has been hurling himself into the vocal with a genuinely staggering force. Yet there’s also a note of tension about the evening. The pressure of completing the album has reportedly been wearing on Dylan, and his mood is said to have been rather dour and unpredictable these last several days. In fact, somewhere along the line he has decided to put aside most of the rock & roll tracks he had been working on in Topanga, and is apparently now assembling the album from various sessions that have accrued over the last year. “It’s all sorts of stuff,” he says. “It doesn’t really have a theme or a purpose.”

While waiting for his backup singers to arrive, Dylan tries to warm up to the task of the evening’s interview. But in contrast to his manner in our earlier conversations, he seems somewhat distracted, almost edgy, and many questions don’t seem to engender much response. After a bit, I ask him if he can tell me something about the lyrical tenor of the songs. “Got My Mind Made Up,” for example, includes a reference to Libya. Will this be a record that has something to say about our national mood?

He considers the subject. “The kinds of stuff I write now come out over all the years I’ve lived,” he says, “so I can’t say anything is really that current. There may be one line that’s current. . . . But you have to go on. You can’t keep doing the same old thing all the time.”

I try a couple more questions about political matters—about whether he feels any kinship with the new activism in pop music—but he looks exhausted at the possibility of seriously discussing the topic. “I’m opposed to whatever oppresses people’s intelligence,” he says. “We all have to be against that sort of thing, or else we have nowhere to go. But that’s not a fight for one man, that’s everybody’s fight.”

Over the course of our interviews, I’ve learned you can’t budge Dylan on a subject if he’s not in the mood, so I move on. We chat a while, but nothing much seems to engage him until I ask if he’s pleased by the way the American public is responding to the upcoming tour. Demand has been so intense that the itinerary has been increased from twenty-six to forty shows, with more dates likely. In the end, it’s estimated that he’ll play to a million people.

“People forget it,” he says, “but since 1974, I’ve never stopped working. I’ve been out on tours where there hasn’t been
any
publicity. So for me, I’m not getting caught up in all this excitement of a big tour. I’ve played big tours and I’ve played small tours. I mean, what’s such a big deal about this one?”

Well, it
is
his first cross-country tour of America in eight years.

“Yeah, but to me, an audience is an audience, no matter where they are. I’m not particularly into this
American
thing, this Bruce Springsteen-John Cougar-’America first’ thing. I feel just as strongly about the American principles as those guys do, but I personally feel that what’s important is more eternal things. This American pride thing, that don’t mean nothing to me. I’m more locked into what’s real forever.”

Quickly, Dylan seems animated. He douses one cigarette, lights another, and begins speaking at a faster clip. “Listen,” he says, “I’m not saying anything bad about these guys, because I think Bruce has done a tremendous amount for real gutbucket rock & roll—and folk music, in his own way. And John Cougar’s great, though the best thing on his record, I thought, was his grandmother singing. That knocked me out. But that ain’t what music’s about. Subjects like ’How come we don’t have our jobs?’ Then you’re getting political. And if you want to get political, you ought to go as far out as you can.”

But certainly he understands, I say, that Springsteen and Mellencamp aren’t exactly trying to fan the flames of American pride. Instead, they’re trying to say that if the nation loses sight of certain principles, it also forfeits its claim to greatness.

“Yeah? What are those principles? Are they biblical principles? The only principles you can find are the principles in the Bible. I mean, Proverbs has got them all.”

They are such principles, I say, as justice and equality.

“Yeah, but . . . ” Dylan pauses. As we’ve been talking, others—including Petty, guitarist Mike Campbell, the sound engineers, and the backup singers—have entered the room. Dylan stands up and starts pacing back and forth, smiling. It’s hard to tell whether he is truly irked or merely spouting provocatively for the fun of it. After a moment, he continues. “To me, America means the Indians. They were here and this is their country, and
all
the white men are just trespassing. We’ve devastated the natural resources of this country, for no particular reason except to make money and buy houses and send our kids to college and shit like that. To me, America is the Indians, period. I just don’t go for nothing more. Unions, movies, Greta Garbo, Wall Street, Tin Pan Alley, or Dodgers baseball games.” He laughs. “It don’t mean shit. What we did to the Indians is disgraceful. I think America, to get right, has got to start there first.”

I reply that a more realistic way of getting right might be to follow the warning of one of his own songs, “Clean Cut Kid,” and not send our young people off to fight in another wasteful war.

“Who sends the young people out to war?” says Dylan. “Their parents do.”

But it isn’t the parents who suited them up and put them on the planes and sent them off to die in Vietnam.