Bob Dylan

by Lee Marshall

  Whether these lines are intentional or not (it seems to me that some of them have to be, though some could be coincidental) is irrelevant. What matters is such references have been grasped that way by their listeners. It has the effect of making Dylan’s old songs seem ‘traditional’, part of the same stock of songs as ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ and ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’. The contemporary Dylan borrows from the stock of old songs, and those old songs include his own and everyone’s. At the same time, wider than merely the response to Time Out Of Mind, there has been a general re-evaluation of Dylan’s older material. In the past there was an emphasis upon the radicalism of Dylan’s early work, of aesthetic ruptures, of audience confrontation, of relentless progress. Today, even when discussing that older work, my impression is of a change in emphasis, a shift to considering the traditional elements of Dylan’s work, of continuity, of rootedness. In 2006, David Hepworth wrote: ‘In an interview in Britain in 1965, he joked about [his age], claiming that he’d made his first record in 1935. None of his peers would have said anything of the kind. Most of his ’60s contemporaries were aggressively contemporary.’37 This is a fair point, but what is most interesting is not what it says about Dylan but what it says about how the media perceive him. No journalist would have picked up on this comment in any significant way before 1997. Within the Dylan fan community, there also seems to be an increasing recognition of Dylan’s rootedness in a range of musical traditions. There has been a reconsideration of the significance of Dylan’s late sixties work (The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline) – in part driven by Dylan’s own playing of many songs from these albums on the NET – that sees these albums as extremely important, as the link between early and late Dylan and the proof of the rootedness of the mid-sixties flux. Marcus’ book on The Basement Tapes was influential in this regard. Even Self Portrait is acquiring a moderate re-evaluation. There has also been a reappraisal of Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong, seeing them recontextualised as purposeful reconnections with traditional music rather than aimless contract filler by someone who couldn’t write. Dylan’s entire career is becoming understood in terms of its relationship to tradition.

  This is not to suggest that there has been a complete inversion of Dylan’s star-meaning. ‘Dylan’ still represents the radicalism and aesthetic revolution of the sixties, particularly to those whose only contact with him comes from short tabloid and magazine references. The standard caption for a picture of Dylan is still ‘sixties icon’ or ‘former folk singer’. But within more serious analysis, and within Dylan’s fan community, there has been some realignment that places emphasis on continuity. Whereas Dylan conventionally has been understood as chameleon-like, frequently changing persona, emphasis is now being placed upon the coherence of Dylan’s relationship to music and stardom. All of Dylan’s career is being reconceptualised, given a particular coherence and teleology, through the prism of his contemporary stardom. This rationalising, this ironing out of inconsistency, is conventionally something that happens to a star after their death. This is the star-time equivalent of what is achieved musically on the NET and on Time Out Of Mind. The effect is that we see Dylan’s entire career in spatial rather than linear terms, subliminally conceptualising the whole of Dylan’s career in any one of the parts. Instead of hearing all the different tambourine men in a particular performance of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, we are able to see or hear all of the old Dylans in this particular moment’s Bob Dylan. Here are two journalists’ accounts of interviewing Dylan:

  As you sit across from him, his face keeps changing. Sometimes it’s that I-see-right-through-you look from the cover of Highway 61 Revisited – you barely notice the white hairs among the curls, the two days’ worth of stubble and the 30 years’ worth of lines. Now he turns his head: there’s the profile from Blood On The Tracks. Now he thrusts his chin up, and he’s the funny, defiant kid who used to wear that Bob Dylan cap. (David Gates, 1997)

  The expressions on Dylan’s face, in person, seem to compress and encompass versions of his persona across time . . . Above all, though, it is the tones of his speaking voice that seem to kaleidoscope through time: here the yelp of the folk pup or the sarcastic rimshot timing of the hounded hipster-idol, there the beguilement of the seventies sex symbol . . . (Jonathon Lethem, 2006)

  I know many Dylan fans who say similar things: how a specific phrase in an interview reminds them of some earlier interview they’ve seen; a wiggle of the leg and he looks just like he did in 1978; the way he stands and bears down at the piano, a cross between a gunslinger and a kitten, reminiscent of him playing ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ in 1966. Sometimes, for a moment, he can seem incredibly young.*

  My argument, therefore, is that Dylan’s contemporary stardom has, in some weird way, stepped out of its own history. His stardom emphasises its spatial dimensions rather than a sense of linear progression. This means that, in perceiving the Bob Dylan of the now, we simultaneously perceive the faces and voices of his entire career, not as a series of discrete moments but as some kind of unity, in the same way that we hear individual folk and blues songs not as discrete units but as embedded within a greater tradition. Dylan’s contemporary stardom is no longer shadowed by the ghosts of past images; instead, his current stardom contains the images of his past. He has the past in his pocket, not on his back,as the following review makes clear:

  The remarkable achievement of “Love And Theft” is that Dylan makes the past sound as strange, haunted and allureing as the future – and this song-and-dance man sings as though he’s drunk too deeply of the past to be either scared or impressed by anybody’s future, least of all his own.

  This reorientation of Dylan’s stardom has had a great impact on Dylan’s status as a contemporary artist. Reviews of Dylan’s 2001 album “Love And Theft” were almost universally flattering, and the response to the 2006 follow-up, Modern Times was almost as good.* Modern Times proved a remarkable commercial success too, reaching the Top 10 in many countries. In between these albums, responses to two non-musical releases offer evidence of how the contemporary Dylan image stands shoulder-to-shoulder with his sixties myth. These were his autobiography Chronicles (2004) and the movie documentary No Direction Home (2005). Both releases garnered an extraordinary amount of press coverage; as one film reviewer pointed out, Dylan is a rare breed of star who can make headlines simply by speaking. The majority reaction to both releases was positive. Chronicles was described as ‘a landmark in musical memoirs’, with praise for ‘Dylan’s extraordinary command of language, married in the book to an uncanny recall of events and a masterly narrative sensibility’. An equally enthusiastic response greeted Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home (‘the finest rock documentary you’ll ever see’). What is notable about both releases is that they did not give cause for nostalgia; there was no sense of longing for the old Dylan, and no grumbling about the new Dylan’s inadequacies. The documentary in particular gave an impression of the enormity of Dylan’s achievements in the sixties, but this did not detract from the older figure being interviewed. It was possible to see how the man in front of us was, in another lifetime, able to achieve such heights. All reviews portrayed Dylan as existing ‘square in the moment’, providing a distinct sense of who he is now. The interview Dylan gave for the documentary showed a wise man offering an omniscient view of history, giving ‘his appearance . . . something of the quality of a statue come to life’. Chronicles was described as a ‘book bursting with life’ with the sense of Dylan as ‘absolutely present’. Ultimately, the book ‘serves a vital purpose in reminding us of Dylan’s genius’.

  Dylan’s remarkable media presence in the last few years (conceivably greater than any time since the sixties) and the upturn in his reputation have given Dylan’s star-image a particular swagger at this time. One reviewer suggested that he ‘has never been more comfortable in his own skin’. When I said earlier that there was no place for irony in Dylan’s contemporary
image, it was a half-truth. There is scope for irony, not in relation to the songs, or to wider tradition, but with regard to Dylan’s own myth. A notable feature of “Love And Theft” is the confidence of the whole presentation – the audacious borrowing, the musical swing, the vocal gymnastics. “Love And Theft” has the aura of a man so at ease in his idiom that he knows he is untouchable:

  You say my eyes are pretty and my smile is nice

  Well I’ll sell ’em to you at a reduced price

  (‘Honest With Me’)

  Whereas Time Out Of Mind had a consistent overall mood and sound, “Love And Theft” is defined by its eclecticism. Dylan takes on a variety of forms of American song – from rockabilly to crooning to bluegrass to urban blues – and the effect is to demonstrate his mastery of all of the currents of American popular music.* ‘Relaxed, magisterial, utterly confident in every musical idiom he touches’ declared one reviewer. ‘A greatest hits album’, Dylan told Edna Gunderson in 2001, ‘without the hits.’

  No line better encompasses everything I’m suggesting here than one from ‘Summer Days’:

  She says ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ I say, ‘You can’t?

  What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can.’

  This one line does so much! Firstly, it can be interpreted as a comment on Dylan’s later career, of how he has managed to find endlessly creative ways of renewing the past. Secondly, the entire line, as so much of “Love And Theft” is stolen. In this instance taken not from a song but a novel, The Great Gatsby. Thirdly, its source actually brings to mind an earlier Dylan song, ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’, in which he exclaims ‘You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books / You’re very well read, it’s well known’ (which, in turn, produces the irony of Dylan claiming himself to be very well read, a particularly sharp one given the ‘plagiarism controversy’). Finally, and most importantly, the sheer vocal audacity in being able to sing this ridiculously long line as a line emphasises Dylan’s supreme confidence and ‘ownership’ of these stolen words. ‘I contain multitudes’, the singer tells us.

  This confidence goes beyond singing style; it inhabits all of Dylan’s contemporary stardom. Dylan knows the game being played and he knows he’s good at it. Perhaps for the first time in thirty-five years, Dylan today speaks as someone in control of his myth. Who else, with a glint in his eye, could make you this offer?

  You’re talking to a person who owns the sixties. . . . I own the sixties – who’s going to argue with me? I’ll give ’em to you if you want ’em. You can have ’em. (Jonathon Lethem interview, 2006)

  And who could refuse?

  * This is despite the fact that Dylan’s voice has often been characterised as old before, most notably with regard to his first album, on which it is hard to believe that the singing voice belongs to a 20-year-old.

  * Songs already covered and officially released by Dylan!

  * And a similar rumpus when several lines from Modern Times (2006) were sourced back to the American Civil War poet, Henry Timrod. Modern Times, released after this chapter was first written, continues the trend of making use of explicit quotations: ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’’ is a rewrite of Muddy Waters’ song of the same name while ‘The Levee’s Gonna Break’ harks back to Memphis Minnie’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’. Familiar lyrical lines float through all of the songs, such as ‘I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall’, ‘Put on your cat clothes’ and ‘Blues this morning fallin’ down like hail’.

  * ‘All the words have been used; it’s just how we put them together. And even that – though we might think we’ve come up with something super, fantastic, I think if you look in the right place you’ll find someone else has done it’ (Bill Flanagan interview, 1985).

  * For example, the emergence of the printed music score changed perceptions of what ‘music’ was and, therefore, what individual works of music could mean. As composition could now be separated from performance, it generated a new music-maker, a ‘composer’. This created a specialisation of knowledge that not only produced a hierarchy of production (composers are assumed to be more talented than instrumentalists) but also a hierarchy of consumption (listening to classical music ‘properly’ requires knowledge of compositional techniques) (Frith, 2001:29–30).

  * It is important to recognise the influence that technology has on our experience of musical time. The advent of CD technology has enabled us to become more aware of how we experience time and has, therefore, changed our experience of music.

  *I am in debt to Dai Griffiths for offering this analogy to me.

  ** Since 2002, Dylan has stopped playing guitar on stage – it has been suggested that arthritis makes it impossible for him to play regularly. He now plays piano or keyboards, which I think have proved far less successful in his attempts to stop time.

  * In this instance from an academic book on blackface minstrelsy written by Eric Lott in 1993. There are certainly links with minstrelsy on the album in its burlesquing of Shakespeare and use of jokes, but whether Dylan has read this book or not doesn’t matter. The further intertextual linking of Dylan to another form of traditional music does matter, however, especially given Shank’s argument (2002) that the legacy of blackface minstrelsy is the ‘structuring principle’ of American popular music, providing ‘a history of more or less successful attempts at self-recreation’, of whites pretending to be blacks, of naifs pretending to be sophisticates (and vice versa). (See also Meisel’s argument (1999) that rock music is characterised by a ‘crossing over’ of cowboy and dandy.) Shank argues that, rather than real political unity, the folk revival’s relationship with the civil rights movement is actually one of blackface appropriation. This bears similarities with Grossberg’s analysis of the emergence of rock discussed in chapter 4.

  * Michael Gray draws a useful comparison between Dylan’s voice and Leonard Cohen’s later singing style (2000:791).

  * It also seems to me that the title and chorus of the follow-up recording, ‘Things Have Changed’ – ‘I used to care, but things have changed’ – are a quite calculated reference to ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’.

  * This actually is another form of continuity. Speaking of some recording sessions in 1976, T-Bone Burnett claimed ‘I don’t know whether he time-travels or shape-shifts or what you would call it, but you would look at him one moment and he would like a fifteen-year-old kid and you would look at him the next moment and he would look like an eighty-year-old man, and at the time he was in his mid-thirties’ (in Sounes, 2001:342).

  * The very useful website Metacritic (http://www.metacritic.com/) collates and averages published reviews of films and music released since 2000. “Love And Theft” was the most highly rated album of 2001, averaging 93 per cent across all reviews. Currently, Modern Times was the third rated 2006 release, averaging 89 per cent.

  * His radio series, Theme Time Radio Hour has a similar effect. The eclectic and obscure songs selected by Dylan, and the information he gives about the artists between songs, give the impression of someone who just knows everything about all of this music.

  NOTES

  Chapter 1 Introduction

  1 Bourdieu, 1993:162.

  2 Schickel, 2000:108.

  3 Evans and Hesmondhalgh, 2005:4.

  4 Turner, 2004:14–15.

  5 Scobie, 2003:85.

  6 Schickel, 2000.

  7 Rojek, 2001:9.

  8 Frith, 2001:35.

  9 Evans, 2005:2.

  10 Rojek, 2004:173–4.

  11 P. D. Marshall, 1997:37.

  12 Turner, 2004:103.

  Chapter 2 Stardom, Authorship and the Meaning of Songs

  1 In Heylin, 2000:4.

  2 Heylin, 2000:xv.

  3 Smith, 2005:x.

  4 Frith, 1998:185.

  5 Dyer, 1998:61.

  6 Dyer, 1998:153.

  7 Sounes, 2001:100.

  8 P. Williams, 1990:xvii.

  9 Abrams, 1953.

  10 Day, 198
9; Ricks, 2003; Scobie, 2003.

  11 Scobie, 2003:88.

  12 Scobie, 2003:48.

  13 Scobie, 2003:162.

  14 Abrams, 1953:272.

  15 Laing, 1990:327.

  16 Ricks, 2003:19.

  17 Gray, 2000.

  18 Moore, 2001:181.

  19 Frith, 1998:158–9.

  20 In Moore, 2001:185–6.

  21 Frith, 1998:164.

  22 P. Williams, 2005:207.

  23 Frith, 1998:166.

  24 Frith, 1998:169.

  25 P. Williams, 1996:16-19.

  26 Moore, 2001:186.

  27 Frith, 1988:120.

  28 Hitchcock, 2006:89.

  29 Bauldie, 1985:39.

  30 Frith, 1998:172.

  31 Hitchcock, 2006:89.

  32 Barthes, 1990:297.

  33 Barthes, 1990:295.

  34 In Corcoran, 2002:11.

  35 Frith, 1998:196–7.

  36 Frith, 1998:186.

  37 P. Marshall, 1997:90.

  38 Brown, 2002:193.

  39 Schickel, 2000.

  40 Heylin, 2000:ix.

  41 Roe, 2002:86.

  42 Dyer, 1991:133–6.

  43 Scobie, 2003:40.

  44 Moran, 2000:23.

  45 Gilman, 1989:5–6.

  46 Stone 1990:169–72.

  47 Barbas, 2001:35–57.

  48 Dyer, 1998:21.

  49 P. Williams, 1990:xvii.

  50 Frith, 1998:210.

  51 P. Williams, 1996:15.

  52 Berger, 1972:27–8.

  53 Ricks, 2003:360.

  54 Dyer, 1998:62.

  Chapter 3 Folk Stardom: Star as Ordinary, Star as Special