When I was younger it was hard for me to keep the future and the past from collapsing—I mixed up astronauts and dinosaurs, for instance. It was hard for me, too, thanks to the bohemian demimonde in which I dwelled, the milieu of my parents and their friends, all of them with their astonishingly valuable and mistreated record collections, to believe that Bob Dylan and the Beatles were not about fifty or a hundred years old, as canonical as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Walt Whitman, as revered as Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. The first time I learned human beings still lived—some of them my aunts and uncles—who thought of rock and roll as “that noise,” I barked laughter, feeling slaphappy disbelief. The myths of the ’60s seemed biblically ancient.
So the quest for the identity of the “Fifth Beatle,” an allegory of authenticity as deep as a Zen koan, represented an attempt to understand the world into which I’d been born. It haunted me like a ghost of crime, a Ross Macdonald investigation, where the façade of the present life peels off to expose the wild truths of the past, the impostures—some brave, some shameful—on which our contemporary reality was founded. Who was “Murray the K”? What was payola? Do you mean to say someone had to be paid to play rock and roll on the radio, that the music bought its way into our hearts? This idea conflated easily with the idea of “the hook” itself, the sense that pop was a trick, a perverse revenge against the banality of daily life dreamed up collectively by ten or fifteen Delta bluesmen and a million or a hundred million screaming twelve-year-old girls. If a rock-and-roll song with a killer hook was like a drug or a virus, and payola a kind of hypodermic needle, made to penetrate a resistant culture, then we all lived in a world permanently drugged or psychedelically sick with fever. If so, I was happy to live on the drugged and feverish side of the catastrophe.
The Fifth Beatle candidates after Murray the K—Sutcliffe, Best, Epstein, Voorman, Preston—made a sequence of suspects who were also victims. They seemed to indict the magic circle of four for some wrongdoing, but also confirmed them in their status as iconic survivors: Probably no one else deserved to be a Beatle. I remember the day I learned Ringo’s drumming was “bad.” So bad Paul had done some of it for him. Then—I recall it as if it was the very next thing I learned, like geometry leading to algebra—I found in the writings of some great man the beautiful thought that Ringo’s role was to be our surrogate in the band, the Beatle who was also a fan of the Beatles, in awe of the “real ones” from the nearest possible proximity. So maybe there was no fifth Beatle, maybe there wasn’t even a fourth! George, too, was given a free ride in the other songwriters’ wake (yet you also could sense he was stunted or thwarted or cheated). John claimed bitterly that he wrote the hook to “Taxman,” George’s “best” song, just as Ray Davies was quick to note he helped his brother with “Death of a Clown,” Dave Davies’s greatest hit. So the sham notion of a “democracy of talent” within these groups, with its analogous utopian implications for collective action, for a gestalt-mind as depicted in Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, could dissolve into sour cynicism. The presiding genius probably could have done just as well with any other supporting cast. Or the reverse: The solo careers in the band’s wake could seem so thin that the magic must have been in the lucky conjunction of a bunch of ordinary blokes, raised above their station as much by history and our love as by any personal agency—if there wasn’t a Beatles we’d have had to invent one, and we did. For evidence, listen to the Beatles’ Live at the Hollywood Bowl—here’s a music content to ride like a froth of sea foam atop a tsunami wave of adulation and yearning for itself. What were little-girl screams if not the essential heart of the Beatles’ true sound, the human voice in a karaoke track consisting of the band itself? Dylan? Study reveals he was always just the guy who happened to be smart enough to steal Jon Pankake’s record collection, not so much a musician as a music-writer’s daydream run mad.
Our urge to expose the trick is bound up in our mad love at being tricked, a revenge of the seduced, and a projection of our vanity into the space between the singer and the song. Jim Morrison and Michael Stipe, unmusical jesters, posturing poets, charlatans—yet imagine their bands shorn of them, and maybe you’re left with only forgettable garage-rock outfits, nobody Chuck Berry couldn’t hustle up in time to play a quick gig and then steal back out of town. Another charlatan was James Brown. Musicians who shared his stages hasten to explain Brown was, alas, not a musician: the Godfather of Soul, a fake Beethoven propped up by his orchestra. This notion of James Brown as a presider over music he could never himself play articulates his role as bridge between clown-jazz maestros like Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway, and the rappers whose world James Brown willed into being: the scatting, grunting foreground presence against a landscape of sonic astonishments. The showman’s exhortations to the band, and shouts of surprise at the virtuosity of the soloists, mark him as an MC or DJ who has inserted himself onstage, a figure of pure will, distinct from the audience in terms not so much musical as Nietzschean. To dare to take that vicarious role he’d better be able to dance like a motherfucker—dance, or scream, or suffer, or make us suffer, or even better, all of the above.
This, too, is where the figure of the punk from hell—the Iggy Pop or Sid Vicious whose authority derives from his ineptitude, spontaneity, and pain—can seem an allegory for the whole history of pop itself: three lousy chords and a leather jacket. All little more than a jazzman’s joke taken too seriously. A real music would have some pride, and we, in turn, would have a proper reverence for its history, a proper sense of its distance from ourselves. Instead, our pop life seems at every possible turn surrounded by the figure of the pretender, by swimmers in the ocean of the vicarious: the maker of mix tapes who believes he is in some way to credit for the beauty of the music, and who is believed by his lover, the child stars and American Idols whose degraded and ludicrous projection guiltily thrills us, the lip-synchers and air guitarists and mirror stars, the one-shot bands, the garage bands, the party bands that luck into a contract, those of us who’ve kidded ourselves that our dancing or our writing, or both, makes us something like rock stars, somehow sized to slip into Wonderland—we Fifth Beatles, we happy fakes. This whole story really is a naked egalitarian dream, isn’t it?
—EMP Pop Conference, The Guardian, 2007
Dylan Interview
1.
“I don’t really have a herd of astrologers telling me what’s going to happen. I just make one move after the other, this leads to that.” Is the voice familiar? I’m sitting in a Santa Monica seaside hotel suite, ignoring a tray of sliced pineapple and sugar-dusty cookies, while Bob Dylan sits across from my tape recorder, giving his best to my questions. The man before me is fitful in his chair, not impatient but keenly alive to the moment, and ready on a dime to make me laugh and to laugh himself. As others have described, the expressions on Dylan’s face, in person, seem to compress and encompass versions of his persona across time, a sixty-five-year-old with a nineteen-year-old cavorting somewhere inside. 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 rim-shot timing of the hounded hipster-idol, there the beguilement of the ’70s sex symbol, then again—and always—the gravel of the elder statesman, that antediluvian bluesman’s voice the young aspirant legendarily invoked at the very outset of his work and then ever so gradually aged into.
It’s that voice, the voice of a rogue ageless in decrepitude, which grounds the paradox of the achievement of Modern Times, his thirty-first studio album. Are these our “modern times,” or some ancient, silent-movie dream, a fugue in black and white? Modern Times, like Love and Theft and Time Out of Mind before it, seems to survey a broken world through the prism of a heart that’s worn and worldly, yet decidedly unbroken itself. “I been sitting down studying the art of love / I think it will fit me like a glove,” he declares in “Thunder on the Mountain,” the opening song, a rollicking blues you’ve heard a million times before and yet w
hich magically seems to announce still another “new” Dylan. “I feel like my soul is beginning to expand,” the song declares. “Look into my heart and you will sort of understand.”
What we do understand, if we’re listening, is that we’re three albums into a Dylan renaissance that’s sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock ’n’ roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out—a knowledge which includes the fact that the early blues and its players were stranger than any purist would have you know, hardly restricting themselves to twelve-bar laments, but featuring narrative recitations, spirituals, X-rated ditties, popular ballads, and more. Dylan offers us nourishment from the root cellar of American cultural life. For an amnesiac society, that’s arguably as mind-expanding an offering as anything in his ’60s work. And with each succeeding record Dylan’s convergence with his muses grows more effortlessly natural.
How does he summon such an eternal authority? “I’d make this record no matter what was going on in the world,” Dylan tells me. “I wrote these songs in, not a meditative state at all, but more like in a trancelike, hypnotic state. This is how I feel? Why do I feel like that? And who’s the me that feels this way? I couldn’t tell you that, either. But I know that those songs are just in my genes and I couldn’t stop them comin’ out.” This isn’t to say Modern Times, or Dylan, seems oblivious to the present moment. The record is littered—or should I say baited?—with glinting references to world events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, though anyone seeking a moral, to paraphrase Mark Twain, should be shot. And, as if to startle the contemporary listener out of any delusion that Dylan’s musical drift into pre-rock forms—blues, ragtime, rockabilly—is the mark of a nostalgist, “Thunder on the Mountain” also name-checks a certain contemporary singer: “I was thinking ’bout Alicia Keys, I couldn’t keep from crying / While she was born in Hell’s Kitchen I was livin’ down the line.” When I ask Dylan what Keys did “to get into your pantheon” he only chuckles at my precious question. “I remember seeing her on the Grammys. I think I was on the show with her, I didn’t meet her or anything. But I said to myself, there’s nothing about that girl I don’t like.”
Rather than analyzing lyrics, Dylan prefers to linger over the songs as artifacts of music, and describes the process of their making. As in other instances, stretching back to 1973’s Planet Waves, 1978’s Street Legal, and 2001’s Love and Theft, the singer and performer known for his love-hate affair with the recording studio—“I don’t like to make records,” he tells me simply, “I do it reluctantly”—has cut his new album with his touring band. And Dylan himself is the record’s producer, credited under the nom de studio “Jack Frost.” “I didn’t feel like I wanted to be overproduced anymore,” he tells me. “I felt like I’ve always produced my own records anyway, except I just had someone there in the way. I feel like nobody’s gonna know how I should sound except me anyway, nobody knows what they want out of players except me, nobody can tell a player what he’s doing wrong, nobody can find a player who can play but he’s not playing, like I can. I can do that in my sleep.”
As ever, Dylan is circling, defining what he is first by what he isn’t, by what he doesn’t want, doesn’t like, doesn’t need, locating meaning by a process of elimination. This rhetorical strategy goes back at least as far as “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “All I Really Want to Do” (“I ain’t looking to compete with you,” etc.), and it still has plenty of real juice in it. When Dylan arrives at a positive assertion out of the wilderness of so much doubt, it takes on the force of a jubilant boast. “This is the best band I’ve ever been in, I’ve ever had, man for man. When you play with guys a hundred times a year you know what you can and can’t do, what they’re good at. Whether you want ’em there. It takes a long time to find a band of individual players. Most bands are gangs. Whether it’s a metal group, or pop rock, whatever, you get that gang mentality. But for those of us who went back further, gangs were the mob. The gang was not what anybody aspired to. On this record I didn’t have anybody to teach. I got guys now in my band, they can whip up anything, they surprise even me.” Dylan’s cadences take on the quality of an impromptu recitation, replete with internal rhyme schemes, such that when I later transcribe this tape I’ll find myself tempted to set the words on the page in the form of a lyric. “I knew this time it wouldn’t be futile writing something I really love, and thought dearly of, and then I’m in the studio and having it be beaten up and whacked around and come out with some kind of incoherent thing which didn’t have any resonance. With that, I was awake. I felt freed up to do just about anything I pleased.”
But getting the band of his dreams into the studio was only half the battle. “The records I used to listen to and still love, you can’t make a record that sounds that way,” he explains. It is as if having taken his new material down to the crossroads of the recording studio Dylan isn’t wholly sure the deal struck with the devil there was worth it. “Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn’t make his records if you had a hundred tracks today. We all like records that are played on record players, but let’s face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don’t know anybody who’s made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded ’em. CDs are small. There’s no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like everybody’s gettin’ music for free. I was like, well, why not? It ain’t worth nothing anyway.”
2.
Hearing the word “Napster” come from Bob Dylan’s mouth, I venture, as a fan whose life has been enriched by recordings that have not enriched certain musicians and their record companies, a question about bootleg recordings. In my own wishful thinking The Bootleg Series, a sequence of superb archival retrospectives, sanctioned by Dylan and released by Columbia, represents an unspoken consent to the tradition of pirate scholarship—acknowledgment that Dylan’s outtakes, alternate takes, rejected album tracks, and live performances are themselves a towering body of work that faithful listeners deserve to hear. As Michael Gray says in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, the first three-disc release of outtakes “could, of itself, establish Dylan’s place as the pre-eminent songwriter and performer of the age and as one of the great artists of the 20th Century.” On Love and Theft’s “Sugar Baby,” the line “some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff” was taken by some as a shout-out to this viewpoint. Today, at least, that line seems to have had only moonshine whiskey as its subject. “I still don’t like bootleg records. There was a period of time when people were just bootlegging anything on me because there was nobody ever in charge of the recording sessions. All my stuff was being bootlegged high and low, far and wide. They were never intended to be released, but everybody was buying them. So my record company said, Well, everybody else is buying these records, we might as well put them out.” But Dylan can’t possibly be sorry that the world has had the benefit of hearing, for instance, “Blind Willie McTell”—an outtake from 1985’s Infidels that has subsequently risen as high in most people’s Dylan pantheon as a song can rise, and which he himself has played live since. Can he? “I started playing it live because I heard the Band doing it. Most likely it was a demo, probably showing the musicians how it should go. It was never developed fully, I never got around to completing it. There wouldn’t have been any other reason for leaving it off the record. It’s like taking a painting by Manet or Picasso—goin’ to his house and lookin’ at a half-finished painting and grabbing it and selling it to people who are ‘P
icasso fans.’ The only fans I know I have are the people who I’m looking at when I play, night after night.”
With possibly mutual relief, we turn to matters of live performance. Dylan and his favorite band ever are just a few days from undertaking another tour, one that will be well under way by the time Modern Times is released in late August. I’ve always wanted to ask: When a song suddenly appears on a given evening’s set list, retrieved from among the hundreds in his back catalog, is it because Dylan’s been listening to his old records? “I don’t listen to any of my records. When you’re inside of it, all you’re listening to is a replica. I don’t know why somebody would look at the movies they make—you don’t read your books, do you?” Point taken. He expands on the explanation he offered for “Blind Willie McTell”: “Strangely enough, sometimes we’ll hear a cover of a song and figure we can do it just as well. If somebody else thought so highly of it, why don’t I? Some of these arrangements I just take. The Dead did a lot of my songs and we’d just take the whole arrangements because they did it better than me. Jerry Garcia could hear the song in all my bad recordings, the song that was buried there. So if I want to sing something different I just bring out one of them Dead records and see which one I wanna do. I never do that with my records.” Speaking of which: “I’ve heard it said, you’ve probably heard it said, that all the arrangements change night after night. Well that’s a bunch of bullshit, they don’t know what they’re talkin’ about. The arrangements don’t change night after night. The rhythmic structures are different, that’s all. You can’t change the arrangement night after night—it’s impossible.”
The Ecstasy of Influence Page 35