Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  The song is peculiarly of its time. In the mid-’70s, notoriously, all manner of hocus-pocus masquerading as esoteric wisdom was being granted shelf space. A blockage in the counter-culture’s intellectual plumbing, long predictable, would cause Dylan-Levy’s fable of tomb raiders, mysterious hidden treasure, a ‘mystical child’ and Mexican-type pyramids – icy ones, too – to be taken very seriously. Stuff was backing up everywhere. Deliver a fun cowboy story that could be taken as the description of a numinous ‘quest’ way out west and the fans of Carlos Castañeda’s visionary hokum would be on you like stoned coyotes.

  Whether the Peruvian American’s adventures in shamanism and ready-to-wear enlightenment ever took place is a subject for continuing debate among those who still care. The pertinent fact, according to the always reliable internet, is that his 11 books would sell 28 million copies in 17 languages, and that stacks of those were bought, read and believed in the 1970s. The Castañeda phenomenon, one marker of the intellectual mutations afflicting the remnant counter-culture, was peculiar but far from unusual. While middle America was panicking over fuel shortages amid the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, while rationing was being introduced and gas stations were running dry, those who fancied themselves as seekers after truth were on an intellectual vacation. In the aftermath of the crisis, automobile sales fell in America for the first time in decades. The economy stagnated amid crazy inflation – hitting 12.3 per cent by the end of 1974 – while the aptly named ‘misery index’ (inflation plus unemployment) rose ever upwards. Many people, some of them boasting an education, looked for alternative ways to exist, think and believe. Sometimes it seemed as though any alternative would do.

  You could take your pick: religions of every variety, ancient or newly hatched; primal therapy for your childhood trauma; crystals for your delinquent chakras; the I Ching and Tarot cards – Dylan dabbled with both – to plug you into the collective unconscious. You could be healed by colours, or by channelled ‘energy’, or be brought to instant cosmic consciousness by one of the frequent flyers from a passing UFO. The presence of those visitors among us had been demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, by Erich von Däniken in his wildly popular book Chariots of the Gods? (1968). By the middle of the 1970s, the volume was well on its way to selling 63 million copies around the world. In 1977, Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind would make many millions of dollars from the wishful thinking of the selfsame, ready-made audience. Other questing souls were poring over the mistranslated ‘prophecies’ of Nostradamus, or taking up with the Scientologists, or seeking out the signs and wonders promised by the evangelical communes of the burgeoning Jesus movement. The last of these developments, the latest of America’s recurring religious revivals, would acquire a significance for Dylan before long.

  In the meantime, he was singing in ‘Isis’ of a treasure-seeker crossing the wastelands to ‘the pyramids all embedded in ice’. Out in communal America, in the ‘intentional communities’ springing up haphazardly in the backwoods and desert regions, a belief in pyramid power – another miracle founded on infallible ‘energy’ – was already well established. ‘Seeking’, just as in the Dylan-Levy tale, was also in vogue. The counter-culture was turning inwards, prodded by a growing band of shrinks, seers, saints and mountebanks. It was all a long way from the civil-rights struggle and political engagement. The spiritual fashions of the 1970s could be taken as evidence of a deep disenchantment: those heading for the communes would not have disagreed. In place of a generation’s refusal to believe in their elders or in governments, there was a willingness to believe just about anything. Whether thanks to Levy’s influence or to Dylan’s own foggy understanding of what was afoot, ‘Isis’ played to a certain crowd.

  It was of no moment that plenty of people were trading in this stuff, in music and in print. By 1975, parts of the pop world were being crushed beneath the weight of ‘wisdom’ as the oxymoronic expression ‘New Age thinking’ passed into the language. The depressing thing about ‘Isis’ was and is the fact that Dylan fell for it, or seemed to fall for it. There had been signs before – on John Wesley Harding, on New Morning – but here was his spiritual side exposed for all to see. It counted, fittingly enough, as an omen. With this piece he then persuaded others to take his apparent seriousness seriously. No doubt he half-believed it himself.

  None of this should mean that ‘Isis’ is necessarily a bad song, of course. Mysticism and allegory are old news in literature; poetry is not verifiable scientifically. On the album, nevertheless, these mannered verses and this piece of music seem only to stifle the power of ‘Hurricane’. Perhaps it is simply the jolting difference between the secular ballad written for Rubin Carter amid his real plight in a real prison cell and a windy tale set to a mythographic cliché. Perhaps it is just that even now the ‘Isis’ melody seems forced, lacking in conviction, dull.

  On the Rolling Thunder tour Dylan was capable of transforming this song ‘about marriage’ in his performances, at least if the Montreal footage from the film Renaldo and Clara is to be trusted.28 Dispensing with his guitar, wielding his harmonica like a personal weapon, speeding the song’s tempo, prowling around the stage and singing as well as he had ever done, Dylan turned the fake-mystical western without much of a tune into something memorable and, by its lights, authentic. For all that, the film of a venomously precise performance in early December serves only to demonstrate the weaknesses of the studio version recorded in New York on 31 July. On stage, Dylan’s sheer driven energy helped to distract attention from what could not be concealed on the album.

  So what kind of famous song – more particularly, what kind of Bob Dylan song – is this? Why Isis? Why give the female lead in this little cowboy story the name of an Egyptian deity if, in the Levy version, there was no symbolic intent? Interrogating the theatre director during the Rolling Thunder tour, Larry Sloman would try to call in evidence the sensationally inept Jesus-meets-Isis D.H. Lawrence tale The Man Who Died (1929).29 (Specimen: ‘He crouched to her, and he felt the blaze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.’ The fantasy ends with the actually immortal observation that ‘Tomorrow is another day’.) Levy would not entertain the suggestion of a relationship. The song, he claimed, had nothing to do with an Egyptian goddess. Those pyramids had been introduced, supposedly, only as a substitute for the Grand Teton mountain range. The locale for ‘Isis’ was therefore ‘the hills somewhere in Wyoming or something’. The story had arisen, said the trained psychotherapist gamely, only because of some sort of unconscious connection. Despite his presumed expertise in such matters, Levy did not speculate on the nature of the connection.

  In June of 1985, during a syndicated satellite radio interview, Dylan persisted with the transparent conceit that ‘Isis’ was as much a mystery to him as it was to anyone. A caller was told that he had written the song with another person, that ‘I think half the verses were mine and half the verses were his’. Somehow, ‘it just sort of ended up being what it was. I really don’t know too much in depth what it would mean.’30 If the junior writing partner was misinformed, then, or if he had failed somehow to notice that his co-author might possibly have chosen his strange song title for a reason, where was Dylan heading with this stuff? God-wards, more or less.

  In old Egypt, Isis was, as another song might have put it, a friend to the poor. Slaves and sinners enjoyed her patronage. She was the mother goddess, a protector of children and of the dead. Her vast wings afforded shelter and her ‘lap’ was identified with the throne of the kingdom. She taught mortal women how to grind corn and weave; she taught people how to combat illness and how to marry. She was the sister and consort of Osiris, the creator of civilisations, later the ruler of the underworld. Cults of Isis have persisted to the present day, some of them exotic enough to be at home in certain parts of California, but she is not often identified with Sara Dylan.

  In his vastly influential The Golden Bough (1890–1915), the Scottish anthrop
ologist J.G. Frazer writes of Isis-worship developing from the fertility cult of ‘a rustic Corn-Mother adored with uncouth rites by Egyptian swains’ to the religion of ‘the true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent queen of nature, encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial and mysterious sanctity’.31 Only a short leap was required after Christianity’s appearance, it seems, to transport prospective worshippers from Isis to the matching cult of the Madonna. Dylan would follow.

  The American Joseph Campbell, pioneer of comparative mythology and propounder of the belief that myth is central to all human society, drew heavily on Frazer’s work, and from Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, for his claim that storytelling has followed a pattern – ‘the hero’s journey’ – in almost every culture and at almost every point in history. Campbell called it ‘the one, shape-shifting yet marvellously constant story’.32 In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) he traced fully 17 stages in this ‘monomyth’, during which the heroic sort is called to adventure, meets his mentor and experiences an ineffable ‘threshold passage’. So far, so ‘Isis’.

  Thereafter, as though trapped in a mythopoetic board game – or, indeed, stuck inside the average Hollywood action movie – the hero has to find his allies and guides, face ordeals, resist temptations, brave enemies, have his dark night of the soul, survive a final, truly big test, and win the boon he was after to begin with. Then he returns, celebrating, resurrected and fit for his place in society. This is, after a fashion, the Dylan-Levy song.

  In Primitive Mythology (1959), the first volume in a tetralogy he would entitle The Masks of God, Campbell would observe that Isis and Osiris, siblings and spouses, were born ‘during the sacred interval of those five supplementary days’ that fell between one 360-day Egyptian calendric year and the next. The ‘five intercalated days … were taken to represent a sacred opening through which spiritual energy flowed into the round of the temporal universe’.33 So: ‘I married Isis on the fifth day of May’? So: ‘things would be different the next time [my italics] we wed’? If that was the idea, Dylan-Levy were adrift with their Egyptology. The five added days in the ancient calendar did not fall anywhere near the month we know as May.

  Nevertheless, in Occidental Mythology (1964) Joseph Campbell would identify Isis – along with Venus-Aphrodite, Cybele, Ishtar and others besides – as a version of the pre-Christian ‘Mother of God’.34 As in Primitive Mythology, she was recalled as ‘the natural mother of all things’, ‘adored throughout the world’. This was the ‘Isis of Ten Thousand Names’. Involve her in a song ‘about marriage’, therefore, and you have stepped just a little way beyond the usual romantic clichés.

  Campbell’s influence was approaching its height in the 1970s: Primitive Mythology alone went through 11 reprints during the decade. No one had yet paid serious notice to the fact that his ‘hero’s journey’ template appeared to exclude ordinary mortal women almost entirely, or that a host of modern, post-Enlightenment narratives have nothing in common with his supposedly universal pattern. On the opening page of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell had written, near ecstatically, that ‘myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation’. In the 1970s, this sounded like a claim worthy of study to those inclined towards New Age mysteries, not least because Campbell would also argue that almost everything important about the species – religion, philosophy, art, science, dreams, ‘social forms’ both primitive and historic – had come boiling forth from ‘the basic, magic ring of myth’. Only later would critics begin to ask what any of this actually meant, or presumed to describe. A claim so gigantic was impossible to support with evidence. Precisely because the claim was so gigantic, however, it caught on.

  The Arthurian tale of the Grail quest fits the Campbell mould, but then so does the movie Star Wars (1977), a picture written by George Lucas – typed, at any rate – under the direct and acknowledged influence of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. In fact, any number of numbingly predictable three-act Hollywood hero-vehicles still echo the allegedly primal myth, but only because their writers and directors have taken Campbell’s account of man’s journey for, so to speak, gospel. Dylan-Levy’s little tale might therefore seem to be in a direct line of descent from pop culture’s versions of the mythologist’s theories. But what is interesting about ‘Isis’, once you survive its lacklustre melody, is that the song does no such thing. Dylan, Levy, or both together, subvert the entire idea.

  Campbell prescribes a meeting with a goddess – the ‘Queen Goddess of the World’, indeed – and sees nothing amiss with casting Woman as Temptress whose lure has to be ‘surpassed’ by the hero. Dylan-Levy seem to subscribe to this notion – ‘What drives me to you is what drives me insane’ – but their story ends with their hero’s return to his Isis. As for the quest’s reward, the treasure and boon: the tomb in the song is empty. As the artist sang: ‘There was no jewels, no nothin’, I felt I’d been had.’ The Dylan-Levy song is close to a parody, in fact, of Campbell’s theory. Their protagonist’s return, having dumped his dead companion ‘down in the hole’ and having ‘said a quick prayer’, does not fit with the allegedly immemorial narrative. In the slightly amended version given in Lyrics: 1962–2001, the relevant verse, by far the best in the song, runs:

  She said, ‘Where ya been?’ I said, ‘No place special’

  She said, ‘You look different.’ I said, ‘Well, not quite’

  She said, ‘You been gone.’ I said, ‘That’s only natural’

  She said, ‘You gonna stay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I jes might’

  Successful or not, ‘Isis’ showed Dylan to be dabbling with ideas on the border between poetry and religion. Whether of his own volition – he picked the title, after all – or because Levy had given ‘Isis’ its direction with, allegedly, that first line, Dylan was striking out on a new course. However you read the tale, it treats the union of two people as a metaphysical, even sacred bond. In 1975, this was new for Dylan. It went far beyond the more-or-less conventional pieties of ‘Wedding Song’ on Planet Waves. It also aligned the artist, fast approaching the end of his actual marriage, with the credulous transcendentalist wing of his post-’60s generation. Only one outcome was likely.

  In fact, Desire provided evidence that he was a lot closer to encountering his God in 1975 than anyone cared to notice at the time. After the throwaway (if only) ‘Mozambique’, a track that probably justified its existence because it involved the only truly uptempo pop song from which a useful recording had been extracted, came ‘One More Cup of Coffee’. The refrain, ‘One more cup of coffee for the road / One more cup of coffee ’fore I go / To the valley below’, seemed like an obvious enough comment on death and possible resurrection. The next track all but shouted its meaning, yet few bothered to listen.

  ‘Oh, Sister’, the album’s fifth song, was instead regarded as an attempt – an obtuse and maladroit attempt – to come to grips with emerging feminism. Such it was, in part. As such, it was a big improvement on the entirely witless ‘Rita May’. But Dylan-Levy did more than attempt to address, in a self-serving kind of way, the Women’s Liberation Movement and second-wave feminism in the United States in the 1970s. The authors had awoken late to that, in any case. By 1975, books such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (both 1970) were long established as bestsellers, the visible and vocal expressions of a global upheaval. Dylan, never previously mistaken for a born feminist, was only crashing the party, clumsily, when he sang, ‘Oh, sister, am I not a brother to you?’

  In reality, the Dylan-Levy song, if it counted as any sort of serious response to feminism, embodied an ancient sort of paternalism in the joint authors’ treatment of their ‘sister’. As Michael Gray pointed out in his Song & Dance Man III (2000), and more explicitly in his The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006), with this piece ‘Dylan’s religious focus is on its way to the conventionally Christian’.35 You could even argue that Dylan and his
focus have arrived intact at that righteous position with ‘Oh, Sister’. Then you would find yourself agreeing with Gray’s rueful observation that ‘it’s hard to understand how we could have ignored [this] at the time’.

  No one figured Dylan for a believer in 1975. No one wanted to believe it, despite the words coming out of his mouth. Mystical ‘Isis’ was one thing, a reflection, perhaps, of the decade’s spiritual fads and fancies. Christianity? Here it was, nevertheless. Each of the first three verses of ‘Oh, Sister’ ended, respectively, as follows:

  Our Father would not like the way that you act

  And you must realise the danger …

  And is our purpose not the same on this earth

  To love and follow His direction? …

  We died and were reborn

  And then mysteriously saved …

  Whatever the definitions of sisterhood and brotherhood, this was paternalism from the biblical source, with Emmylou Harris providing dutiful backing vocals as Rivera’s violin played second fiddle to the preacher. The ‘theory’ that Dylan was instead engaged in a kind of songwriter’s call-and-response with Joan Baez because of something she might have written seems flimsy. When you begin to talk of being ‘mysteriously saved’ you are not raking over old love affairs. Religious or not, the result was twee.

  On the album, in another unsettling contrast, the long ballad called ‘Joey’ followed. If ‘Hurricane’ was held to be controversial because of its disputed relationship with the truth, here was real myth-making, though not in the sense understood by Joseph Campbell. The Joseph in this song, ‘Mad Joey’ Gallo, might have been portrayed as a victim of his society and of his times, just like Rubin Carter. Dylan-Levy, or Levy alone, might have been attempting to depict an individual ‘Always on the outside of whatever side there was’, an honourable man seeking only ‘peace and quiet’, hounded by the police and gunned down while trying ‘to protect his family’. The merest brush with the facts of the career of a lifelong vicious mobster dispelled that nonsense. The facts, in any case, were no secret.