Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (2 page)

Just before Philadelphia,
Rolling Stone
has published its interview.
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In the piece, Dylan notes that he ‘saw and felt a lot of things in the Fifties, which generates me to this day. It’s sort of who I am.’ But those times, the people, places, ideas and beliefs they contained, are long gone. The ’60s, the era dominated culturally by a music industry that took transience and novelty for granted, wiped them out. Bob Dylan wiped them out. The songs made by the youth who emerged from the late 1950s continue, however. ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, the kid’s first calling card, closes the Philadelphia show. That’s performance number 1,145.

What kind of charge can the song still contain? Even the younger members of Dylan’s audience, their perceptions fresh, are unlikely to be hearing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ for the first time. Its alluring melody might still provoke an emotional reaction. The singer’s ability to wring the sense of a contemporary meaning from words that are half a century old might still be arresting. The contrast between the verses of youth and a septuagenarian’s gnarled, attrited vocals is, for some of us, invariably affecting. But in this, time is no illusion. It has done its work on Dylan, his songs, and on how those songs are heard. He has played Philadelphia 30-odd times in his career. In 2012, there’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (1,777 performances), ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ (1,057), ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (2,006) and, perennially, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ (2,101). The roughest arithmetic tells you that many millions of people have experienced these songs in concert halls and arenas. To those for whom it matters most, the entrancing novelty of 2012’s show in Philadelphia is the chance to hear 1964’s ‘Chimes of Freedom’ receive only its 54th public performance, if
bobdylan.com
’s busy researchers are right.

But what, as they say, is that all about? Dylan resists the legend of the never-ending tour fiercely. Something about the idea seems to offend him. In the
Rolling Stone
interview, but not for the first time, he asks rhetorical questions of those who wonder over his attachment to the life of the itinerant performer. ‘Is there something strange about touring?’ he asks Mikal Gilmore, his interviewer. ‘About playing live shows? If there is, tell me what it is. Willie [Nelson]’s been playing them for years, and nobody ever asks him why he still tours.’

It’s a fair point. But if the giving of concerts is just one of those quotidian things, why does Dylan’s faithful website transcribe the set list for each and every show, or track the public performances of each and every song all the way back to 1960 and the Purple Onion pizza joint in St Paul, Minnesota, where the 19-year-old Dylan picked up a pitifully few dollars a night for singing the likes of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ and ‘Sinner Man’? That kind of detail, that extreme attention to the minutiae of an existence, appeals most to those who keep alive the disputed myth of an Odyssean tour-without-end. Some of the fans have near-metaphysical notions about Dylan’s activities, yet he – or whoever acts in his name – is both dismissive and complicit.

Anyone who has ever written so much as a postcard has to pay attention, at some point, to the person who did the writing. Who was she? What was he thinking? The poet who inters his earliest verse in the file marked ‘juvenilia’ also inters his younger self. Yet Dylan, in his 70s, elects to confront the words of a 20-something nightly. In some fashion he contends with time itself and leaves you to wonder what the songs still mean to him, if they can still mean anything. He says this to Mikal Gilmore: ‘A performer, if he’s doing what he’s supposed to do, doesn’t feel any emotion at all.’ He engenders feelings, in other words, but is – the old, alleged virtue of the allegedly authentic folk stylist – impersonal. Can that be true?

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Each October, it begins again, the now annual, odd and faintly comical ritual. In 2011, bookmakers judge Dylan their ‘second favourite’. After a lot of late and heavy betting, the singer is even installed briefly as a cert in a race that is no race, a contest never intended as a contest. Where once there had been idle speculation over a mere possibility advanced by a few eccentric enthusiasts, now real money is being laid by people prepared to believe that a popular singer and songwriter could – should? – win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Why not? He already has an (honorary) Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 2008 for his ‘profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked’ – there are no prizes for writing these citations – ‘by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power’. The college dropout meanwhile has degrees granted by serious people at serious universities: from Princeton in 1970 and from St Andrews, Scotland’s oldest such institution, in 2004. In fact, despite the 1963 Tom Paine Award debacle, when his tipsy, freestyle approach to free speech outraged liberalism’s arbiters thanks to an attempt to understand John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Dylan has acquired more scrolls and trophies than one man can easily store. By 2011 his name is attached to France’s green gilt
Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres
medal, Spain’s Prince of Asturias award, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, fully 11 Grammy awards, induction ceremonials in all the appropriate halls of musical fame, and to his homeland’s National Medal of Arts. This last – though Dylan didn’t actually show up for the affair – was bestowed in 2009 by President Barack Obama himself. So much for the insurrectionary ’60s, then.

At the end of May 2012, as the Nobel chatter resumes and tireless commentators return to the vexed topic of pop stars and poetry, Obama reappears to wrap a blue-and-white ribbon around the neck of a stony-faced artist. The commander-in-chief confers what is, for Americans, the most precious piece of costume jewellery available, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Dylan honours the occasion by looking like a hostage. The dark glasses remain in place, even in the White House, but a smile is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps this is because a do-or-die pianist from the Marine Corps Band has just played ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’.

A statement from the administration is the usual thing: ‘considerable influence on the civil rights movement of the 1960s … significant impact on American culture over the past five decades’. Dylan is on line with the novelist Toni Morrison, the astronaut John Glenn, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and others, dead and alive, accounted great and good. Obama says nice, sentimental things and, looking down from his six-feet-and-one-inch eminence, calls Dylan (5′ 7″) a giant.

Sometimes it seems as though he does little else but receive awards. Late in 2012, he tells his interviewer that he turns down most of what he is offered simply because he lacks the time to collect each and every prestigious ornament. Here is an artist who does not struggle in obscurity. Validation, as the language of the age would have it, is not required. Still, every other media report of the White House event persists in describing Dylan as a folk singer. He has not been one of those, by a generous estimate, since 1964. But for those who know nothing of an ancient musical tradition, and who probably couldn’t care less, ‘folk’ is another of those ’60s things.

As 2012 draws to a close, it is announced that Dylan’s song ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, 48 years old, will be among the 2013 ‘inductees’ to the Grammy Hall of Fame. He has meanwhile emerged, without offering comment, from another round of Nobel speculation (once again, the ante-post second favourite has failed to place) and endured another controversy, this time over his paintings and the charge, now familiar, of plagiarism. His 35th studio album,
Tempest
, issued in September, has won a lot of praise, some of it preposterous. Now the announced wonder of the hour involves a venerable ’60s star who, miraculously, can still make serious, intriguing music. For Dylan, it seems, there is no escape from his decade.

Posterity might one day take a different view. The lists of such things remind you, for example, that while nine Bob Dylan albums were released in the 1960s, exactly as many appeared in the following ten years. (If you include the vindictively titled
Dylan
, a collection of leftover cover versions released in retaliation by a spurned record company, the score for the 1970s is in fact ten.) Equally, if chart success is any kind of guide, the artist did far better in the aftermath of ‘his’ era, with three of the American number-one albums that eluded him throughout the ’60s, than he had before.

Still journalism preserves its shorthand note: ‘Dylan/ protest/ voice/ folk/ his generation’. These days, the laptop addendum might skip ahead: ‘Wilderness years/ late renaissance/ astonishing’. The perception behind the precis endures for several reasons. One is that a decade as tumultuous as the ’60s, as purportedly singular, seems still to demand a defining voice. Half a century on, the documentary sequences possess a soundtrack that is beyond cliché: the moptop quartet, the Stones and ‘Street Fighting Man’, a Motown track, and always, as though on an infernal loop, Dylan. Most often he can be heard singing a prophecy-song of changing times when the times foretold are long gone, the prophecy disproven and discarded. Whether this misrepresents history is beside the point. He has become part of the received narrative. No one ever asks the actor when he would like the play to end.

Equally, the chronology of one phase in Dylan’s later career catches the eye for several of the wrong reasons. There came a time when he measured every height with his fall, when his work, like his reputation, suffered a decline so precipitous it seemed unstoppable. Between the appearance of the hectoring evangelical Christian album
Saved
in June of 1980 and 1997’s
Time Out of Mind
the test was to find a good word to say about Dylan’s works, then to find more than a handful of people likely to give a damn. In the second half of the 1980s his albums hovered in the suburbs of the
Billboard
200, peaking at 54 (
Knocked Out Loaded)
or 61 (
Down in the Groove
). A ‘return to form’, declared in repeated triumphs of journalistic hope over experience, might see him graze the top 20, as with 1983’s
Infidels
, or aim for the edge of the top 30, as with
Oh Mercy
(1989). Then the collapse would resume. When the best Dylan seemed capable of producing was a brace of eccentric albums of ancient folk and blues tunes in 1992 and 1993, even the staunchest of old fans were no longer buying it, whatever it was supposed to be. In his live works, meanwhile, he was careering from the high peaks of adulation on an avalanche of lousy reviews.

The twenty-first century would decide that
Good As I Been to You
and
World Gone Wrong
are, in reality, fine and fascinating things, born of love and deep knowledge. Beyond the public gaze, they were the beginnings of Dylan’s artistic redemption. At the time, they sounded like the voice of a wounded man groaning in the wilderness. They sounded, moreover, like the last resort of a poet in the purgatory of contractual obligation. Here, self-evidently, was a songwriter, the most esteemed songwriter in the world, who could no longer write. Notoriously, Dylan failed to release a single original composition between September of 1990 and September of 1997. So who wouldn’t have preferred to remember the candescent racket of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’?

Lists of hits and misses do not begin to tell the story. Amid all the dross of 17 lost years in the ’80s and ’90s there were numerous works of lasting worth. Invariably, however, they were buried, like nuggets in deep silt, on albums that were inept or misconceived.
Knocked Out Loaded
, from 1986, is a lazy, execrable thing that nevertheless contains ‘Brownsville Girl’, one of the most inventive, complex and involving compositions to have appeared under Dylan’s name. Even on the original vinyl record it seemed to come, at the start of side two, as though from nowhere, a narrative woven in patterns so intricate it still puzzles and enthrals admirers. But the track released was itself a shadow, arguably, of an even better original. The fact spoke to another perverse and self-destructive artistic habit.

In the 1980s and 1990s collectors of bootleg recordings began to grasp how completely Dylan could misjudge himself. It is another way of saying that a once-unerring artistic confidence had evaporated. Time and again, the songs he left off his albums were self-evidently superior, superior beyond the limits of relative worth or personal taste, to most of the things he chose to release. It became another Dylan puzzle. This ritual of self-harm had begun with
Infidels
and the decision to omit ‘Foot of Pride’ and ‘Blind Willie McTell’ (in either of its spellbinding incarnations) from the record. By 1989,
Oh Mercy
and the suppression – no other word seems right – of songs such as ‘Series of Dreams’ and ‘Dignity’, the pattern was plain. Both albums as released, for all their intermittent glories, were bedevilled by a lack of conviction. The artist’s worst enemy was the artist himself. Then his ability to write anything at all began to desert him.

He had long lost the glorious facility of youth. No doubt he had heard too many people speak too often, too ponderously or too reverently, about his art. Clearly, he had thought about it himself, often enough, while clarifying his language for 1967’s
John Wesley Harding
, or while distilling the essential spirits of
Blood on the Tracks
in 1974. By the mid-1980s, when he was struggling to assemble the half-hour’s worth of music he would call
Down in the Groove
, he had mislaid even the ability to be professionally glib. It amounted to this: Bob Dylan was no longer capable of composing, unaided, a single wholly new Bob Dylan song. The album was a wretched affair.

It should have been journey’s end for a performer in Dylan’s line of work. Beyond a band of diehards, he was no longer taken seriously. Worse, an artist who had always been impatient with the recording process no longer seemed to take his own records seriously. The next release documented parts of a tour – the wrong parts, but the error was by now predictable – with the Grateful Dead in the summer of 1987. Public gratitude was not much in evidence, if record sales were a guide, and the diagnosis of creative death was confirmed. Somehow Dylan was contriving to make each new album worse than its predecessor. The only rational explanation for
Dylan & the Dead
, so it seemed, was cynicism.