The Dylanologists

by David Kinney

  In one interview he’d say, “People can learn everything about me through my songs—if they know where to look.” In another he would complain about biographical readings of his albums. His repertoire was so “wide-ranging” that “you’d have to be a madman” to use it to learn anything concrete about his life. He complained about people who saw his deteriorating marriage reflected in Blood on the Tracks. On “You’re a Big Girl Now,” the singer has just had a conversation with his lover and is dealing with the painful realization that he’s lost her forever. “Well,” Dylan said about that song, “I read that this was supposed to be about my wife. I wish somebody would ask me first before they go ahead and print stuff like that. I mean it couldn’t be about anybody else but my wife, right? Stupid and misleading jerks sometimes these interpreters are.”

  People should just give up already, Dylan said. “What I’ve done, what I’m doing, nobody else does or has done. When I’m dead and gone maybe people will realize that, and then figure it out. I don’t think anything I’ve done has been evenly mildly hinted at. There’s all these interpreters around, but they’re not interpreting anything except their own ideas. Nobody’s come close.”

  2

  One day in 1993, Dylan materialized on Camden High Street in London. Usually, Dylan wandered around in hoodies and sunglasses, sometimes in the middle of the night, but on this July day he went to a busy boulevard and was dressed to be noticed: He wore a black coat, leather gloves, and a top hat, and he swung a crook-handle umbrella. He spoke to passersby, signed autographs, threw an arm around a pedestrian for a photograph. He sat for tea at an outdoor table. There was a reason for all of this unlikely behavior: Cameras were following him around for a music video.

  Word spread, and someone called Andy, who jumped into a cab and found Dylan sitting in a restaurant called Fluke’s Cradle. Andy sat down at a nearby table, his heart racing. He felt ridiculous. He walked over to the bar and ordered a drink. He had two copies of Homer with him, and though he swore he’d never pester Dylan if he saw him in public, he wanted his hero to sign them. Dylan’s security man, Jim Callaghan, knew Andy from the road, and after a few minutes he gave him the word: Now or never.

  Andy approached, and the table went silent.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Dylan,” Andy said.

  Dylan looked at him. “Yeah?”

  Andy went to mush. (“I am dead,” he would write later. “I want the ground to swallow me up and never let me out again.”) He managed to hand his magazine over and Dylan signed it and Andy thanked him. Walking back to the front of the restaurant, Andy placed himself in a chair that everyone would have to pass—single file—on the way out, and placed his other copy of Homer on the table. Just as Andy planned, Dylan stopped, picked it up, and started flipping through the pages. He made a remark about the Warmline, listed on the inside cover, and laughed. He read a few more pages. When he started to go, Andy told him to keep it, and graciously, Dylan did. He gave his fan a squeeze on the shoulder and walked to a waiting car. As it pulled away, Andy caught a glimpse of Dylan still reading his fanzine.

  He was dumbfounded. How could it have gone so well? Everybody knew the stories of Dylan’s truculence. Andy was prepared for I hate you, or words to that effect. “Every fan he has met,” Andy says, “he has hated.”

  The meeting added fuel to Andy’s obsession. He continued following the tour relentlessly and wrote a book analyzing the concerts year by year. He took a new post at British Telecom that involved travel all over Europe, and he found that the firm had offices virtually everywhere Dylan played. He planned business trips around the tour. At perhaps the apex of his mania, he flew halfway around the world for the sole purpose of hearing that Holy Grail recording, the one on which Dylan plays Street-Legal at a piano in his rehearsal space.

  Then something happened. Andy’s passion cooled and reversed direction. His feelings for Dylan spiraled from love to doubt to deep disillusionment. “I was adrift on a raft of negativity.”

  The reversal took some time. Four years after Andy’s momentous encounter, Dylan was hospitalized with severe chest pains and diagnosed with histoplasmosis, a fungal infection that can cause inflammation of the lining around the heart. He spent a week in the hospital, but he recovered and soon resumed touring. As it happened, Time Out of Mind was released soon after. Though he had written and recorded it before the ailment, its dark musings sounded like Dylan had written it on hospital stationery.

  The health scare and the new record seemed to reignite media interest, as if writers, in preparing obituaries, realized Dylan had reached the age at which he ought to be treated as a living legend. At the same time, Dylan’s office had been working to introduce the singer to the next generation and remind the world of the Bob Dylan myth. A Martin Scorsese documentary cast Dylan as an archetypal American character. A scrapbook re-created his 1960s glory. Pristine recordings of fabled concerts were officially released, bringing the Dylan of 1964, 1966, and 1975 back to life.

  At the dawn of the new century, he suddenly seemed to be everywhere. The iconoclast who complained “everybody’s singing about ketchup or headache medicine or something” went a bit corporate himself. He showed up in a TV ad driving a Cadillac Escalade through a desolate landscape. (“What’s life without the occasional detour?” he asked.) He licensed a song to Pepsi for a Super Bowl ad with Will.i.am, and stalked a supermodel in Venice for Victoria’s Secret. Official Dylan watches ($1,500) and hand-signed Hohner harmonicas in ebony boxes ($5,000) went on sale. He hosted a one-hundred-episode radio show on XM. He started producing paintings, exhibiting them in galleries, and selling the signed prints for thousands of dollars.

  Despite the increased exposure, the world did not get closer to seeing the man behind the mask. Dylan’s manager conducted the interviews that Scorsese used; the director never even met with the singer in the course of making his film. 60 Minutes got a sit-down with Dylan, but not the customary chance to follow the star around with its cameras as he went about his life. He had always been both ambitious and paranoid; now he’d figured out how to be omnipresent and invisible at once. Confidants who knew whether there was a new woman in Dylan’s life, for instance, weren’t telling the world about it.

  Amid all of this manufactured hubbub, Dylan kept making music. After 2001’s “Love and Theft,” he released two albums cut from the same mold, Modern Times (2006) and Together Through Life (2009). Both of them tapped history, old folk and blues, literature and theater. Both were produced by “Jack Frost,” Dylan’s alter ego. He was done with guys in the control room getting in the way.

  For Andy, it felt like the air was slowly escaping from the balloon. He fell for “Love and Theft,” hard, but he thought Modern Times was marred by its “unfounded portentousness.” Was Dylan just faking it? He hated to be critical, but when Cook and Warmuth revealed the borrowing in Chronicles, Andy couldn’t shake the feeling that Dylan was cheating, and possibly breaking the law. With Together Through Life, Andy was officially off the bandwagon. The new songs “sounded so generic and so blandly banal that I felt I was just suffering my way through listening to them, when really I should have been doing something else.”

  There had always been a current of negativity running through Andy’s fan network. He and his fellow Dylan nuts would sit down over beers and argue about which albums were the worst, not which were the best. But suddenly, in the second half of the 2000s, he was becoming repulsed by his musical hero.

  Dylan’s voice was broken. His advancing age, decades of smoking, the twenty-five hundred shows since 1988—all of it had taken a toll. Dylan had never had broad range; now he had almost no tone onstage. It was straight bark. It would have been okay, Andy thought, had it not prompted Dylan to deploy a battery of new mannerisms: “upsinging,” or garnishing the end of every line with a high note; reciting songs staccato-style; relying on “throat-clearing to cover up forgotten words and lines, a long growl to indic
ate that ‘there used to be something I wanted to say here but now this noise will suffice.’”

  Dylan used to seem so authentic. He made Andy believe in him completely. He made audiences think he was singing from the heart, that this was not just another gig. Andy was savvy enough to understand that Dylan had been putting on a brilliant stage act all along. He had always been faking it. But now the vocal cords were so damaged that the production fell apart. It was like watching a play in which the acting and stagecraft weren’t good enough to let the audience lose itself in the illusion. All he saw now was a careless, hollow performer.

  Andy had discovered Dylan as a teen, and he always felt as if Dylan was a big brother. His disillusionment felt like the end of a relationship, a flesh-and-blood one. It seemed like the closest thing to a divorce he had ever experienced. “I was lost,” Andy wrote. It seemed permanent.

  When he wrote about his defection in the ISIS fanzine, he found himself on the defensive from the faithful. He could understand the ill will. “We invest so much in our Dylan experience that it takes on almost religious overtones,” he wrote. “Those who still believe turn on the apostate as an evil heretic who should be silenced by whatever means necessary, the more painful the better.”

  But he was not alone. All over England you could find passionate fans who were upset with Dylan. On a Friday night at the Ship & Mitre, a bar in downtown Liverpool, Christopher Hockenhull, the city’s resident Dylan authority, started in on the singer before he’d finished his first pint of ale. “I don’t like this voice,” he said. “It’s gotten worse and worse and worse. And the standard of the shows. For the first time in my life, Dylan is predictable. Can you find any other time in the last thirty-odd years when you could use the word predictable about Dylan? And the band is no better than a band I could take you to see in any pub. What’s this keyboard about? It’s dreadful.” He took a swallow of his beer and continued. “You’ve got to be objective. It’s horrible organ. It’s like a child up there with the organ you buy for a child.”

  Hockenhull, like Andy Muir, had the credentials to complain. He was a card-carrying Dylan man for decades: founder of a fanzine, Fourth Time Around; a collector serious enough to have rarities land in his lap; inhabitant of an office crammed with books and bootlegs and fanzines. He still loved Dylan’s music. He still performed the songs when he played at a bar near his home. But he was bewildered by what the man was doing these days.

  A measure of Dylan’s appeal had always been that he was not a massively popular mainstream star. He was literary, eccentric, an acquired taste, a cult figure. He sold a lot of records, but he was no Michael Jackson. It used to be that not doing ads was part of Dylan’s authenticity. He was above all that. Now it seemed that Dylan was becoming a brand. “The whole thing has become basically a Bob Dylan PLC,” Hockenhull griped at the bar. “Would you have ever thought you would have seen a Bob Dylan cigarette lighter and mouse mats, all that crap? It’s just so corporate. Well-oiled.”

  Michael Gray, the Song and Dance Man author, said that when a Dylan tape came into the house in years past, he would listen right away. Now a friend would send him a tape and he might listen to a track or two, if that. Sadly, fixing a broken doorknob might be more interesting. This was a man who had written millions of words about Dylan, who traveled the world speaking about him, who (for a fee) hosted fans to his house in a tiny village in the south of France to talk Dylan. He acknowledged the extraordinary greatness of Dylan’s music. “I have long accepted that when you enter the Dylan world,” he once wrote, “you sign up for life.” But the last time that he sensed he was in the presence of greatness was in 2000. He didn’t want to sound like some old man recalling the great days gone by. But decades ago, an entire show could blow the fans away. Then people would only rave about three or four songs. When it got to the point that fans were singling out a lone phrase as evidence that Dylan still had it, Gray found himself wondering, What about the other ninety minutes of sludge?

  In 2002, Gray went to a show in Stockholm. He filed in with the regulars who followed Dylan around in what looked, to Gray’s eyes, like a stupor; “These people depress me,” he wrote. He could only wonder how it felt for Dylan: “night after blurred night, seeing these defeated faces starting up at him in inexplicable glazed agitation?”

  As for the show, he hated it. “Most of the time it seems to me that the real Bob Dylan is largely missing and he’s busier faking it than trying his best,” he wrote. “Where once he was so alive, communicating so much quick creative intelligence so alertly and uniquely, now he snatches at showbiz cliché he once recoiled from.” When he had been at his best onstage, Dylan “lived in the dangerous moment.” In Stockholm he played it safe. “We expect much less now,” Gray wrote, “and get it.”

  One night in the spring of 2009, Dylan played London’s Roundhouse, a converted train-repair shed dating to 1846. It was located up the street from the Fluke’s Cradle on Camden High Street, where Andy had nearly fainted getting Dylan to sign an issue of Homer sixteen years earlier. The Roundhouse gig proved to be a sought-after ticket. The venue held only three thousand people, and with Dylan releasing a new record two days later, fans were hoping he would play a few songs they hadn’t heard before.

  But when Andy got there, he had the sense that everybody was spoiling for a fight. Dylan had made it clear in the past that he didn’t like seeing the same faces up front. On occasion, people who had waited in line all day were ordered back by security. Sometimes individuals were informed that Mr. Dylan did not want to see them at the rail. They were cleared out and replaced with hand-chosen concertgoers. One night the back of the line got into the venue first. This sort of thing happened a lot around 2000 and 2001. One regular took to calling it the Fuck You, Everybody! Tour. In Switzerland, a fan up front said Dylan leaned down and said he didn’t ever want to see him at the rail again. The man swore that he had done nothing to trigger Dylan’s temper. “I usually play to the people in the back,” Dylan said around that time. “I disregard the people in the front.” The superfans would be there every night no matter what he did. He wanted to reach people who had never seen him before.

  Waiting for the Roundhouse show to begin, Andy could see Dylan standing just offstage. He didn’t look happy about what he was seeing. “He was standing with the most depressed look on his face, really, really down, as if he’d rather be anywhere else in the world but here.” It could have been nothing. Dylan could have been preparing himself mentally to go on stage. Maybe it was just a trick of the lights. But Andy couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was in a dark mood.

  The lights went down, and it was Andy’s turn to be sour. After a few songs, he decided he had heard enough. He walked out and headed home. He had better things to do. He checked the time on the way out. He’d lasted thirty-two minutes. “It was awful, it was just rubbish,” he said later. “Plinky-plonky piano. Singing every song the same. He was just faking it. His voice is gone and he’s using tricks to replace emotion.”

  Andy had made arrangements to see Dylan a week later in Edinburgh. He scored tickets in the front row and booked a flight. But a few days after the Roundhouse concert, he was still trying to reconcile his years of passion for Dylan with his bitter feelings about the show. It was psychologically traumatic. He felt guilty about leaving with his old hero up there onstage. “Thirty-four years of unalloyed love for the man, and I walked out on him.”

  When the time came to leave for Scotland, Andy stayed home.

  3

  Michael Gray and Clinton Heylin, the world’s most prolific Dylan writers, didn’t get along. When the men crossed paths, they were loath to share even pleasantries, and by all accounts they held each other in mutual disrespect. It was probably unavoidable. Their personalities did not mesh. Gray was reserved, Heylin brash. They were men of ego, and they didn’t put up with fools without good reason.

  But on the question of the merits of D
ylan’s recent work, they were in general harmony. Gray was disappointed by every new set of Dylan originals after “Love and Theft,” while Heylin thought the critics had overrated even that album. “We’ve all had to watch this extraordinary process whereby he’s sort of become this can-do-no-wrong figure, at the precise point when he does nothing but wrong,” Heylin said. He gave Dylan credit for moments of magnificence on Modern Times in 2006. But he had a hard time hearing fans rave about some recent concert performance of “Like a Rolling Stone,” as if it had been even a shadow of the howling wonder from the 1966 live shows. Those people needed “serious remedial care,” in his opinion. “The ’66 version is one of the greatest things ever. And this”—Late Dylan in concert—“is beyond embarrassing, you know? The band stinks, Bob doesn’t know the words, he can’t sing for shit. Which bit of it is fantastic?”

  To Heylin, argument was sport, his preferred method of communication. Even when he recounted a fact, he loaded it with an opinion, the opinion being that somebody else had it wrong. The man could launch a debate in an empty room. He was the kind of bully you could come to love if you didn’t take whatever came out of his mouth to heart. Face to face, he could be charming and approachable. In his fifties, he still had a boyish face and a bottomless enthusiasm for music.

  Heylin first saw Dylan during his return to England for a six-night stand at Earls Court in 1978. He was eighteen, and already a major fan and bootleg collector. (It was never just Dylan; he was also a punk music fan.) The concerts sparked a resurgence of interest, and soon the country’s fans were coming together for Dylan conferences to trade tapes and talk about his music. At one of these the idea for a “Bob Dylan Information Office” came up, and in 1981, Wanted Man and its newsletter, the Telegraph, were born. Heylin was involved from the beginning. Later, the fanzine would evolve into a critical journal, but he always considered its main purpose to be historical. Let somebody else figure out what “Visions of Johanna” really meant. He wanted to dig for intel, and tapes. He was driven by the sense that the world, at that time, had forgotten how important Dylan was, and by the need to get the facts documented before they were lost or buried.