by Bell, Ian
He didn’t have to be reminded of what had become of Saved and Shot of Love. Columbia had given him another five-album contract in July 1982, but Dylan needed to regain both his credibility and his authority within the company. He had pushed his luck hard, several times over, in the preceding decade and a half among people whose idea of poetry began and ended at the bottom line. Having Bob Dylan on the roster was good for Columbia’s image, in theory, but the lawyers who ran the empire from the Black Rock building on a corner of Manhattan’s 6th Avenue put their real faith in the miraculous transmutation of cheap vinyl into gold. Dylan had been failing to weave that brand of magic. In April 1983, as he commenced work on Infidels, corporate lawyer number one was about to sack corporate lawyer number two as a war between the company’s president, Walter Yetnikoff, and his deputy, Dick Asher, came to a head. Neither man could have been mistaken for a born music lover, nor for an individual in instinctive sympathy with artists.
Dylan wasn’t happy with them and they were not happy with Dylan. Performing at the Stade de Colombes in the Paris suburbs on 23 June 1981, he had expressed grumbling irritation over the fact that he was touring to support Shot of Love while Columbia, inept or apathetic, was failing to get the record into stores. The album, Dylan had told the French crowd, ‘should be coming out sometime soon. If you know exactly when, you call up the record company I record for, whatever one that is today.’ (My italics.) The plain truth remained that Shot of Love had expired like a mayfly. That fact, in turn, might well have had a bearing on Dylan’s rediscovery in 1983 of the joys of ‘secular’ song and the art of disguised meanings.
Dick Asher would be remembered as a typical major label corporate philistine in an article published in 2008 by Simon Napier-Bell, former manager of the Yardbirds, Wham! and several other groups.16 As he recalled the incident, the Englishman had just entered the executive’s office for a meeting when a secretary announced that Bob Dylan was ‘on line one’. The artist, as Napier-Bell would write, had just made ‘a couple of albums full of evangelical zeal but they’d bombed’. Dylan’s contract had come up for renewal – this would be around the time Shot of Love was being recorded, in other words – and Asher was not eager to take the call. As Napier-Bell remembered it, the conversation as it began ‘wasn’t too interesting’. Then the executive began to yell into the phone:
I’ve told you, Bob – no fucking religion! If you can’t agree to that, the deal’s off … Look, I’m telling you. There’ll be no fucking religion – not Christian, not Jewish, not Muslim. Nothing. For God’s sake, man – you were born Jewish, which makes your religion money, doesn’t it? So stick with it, for Christ’s sake. I’m giving you 20 million bucks – it’s like baptising you, like sending you to heaven. So what are you fucking moaning about? You want 20 million bucks from us? Well, you gotta do what we tell you. And what we’re telling you is … No Torah! No Bible! No Koran! No Jesus! No God! No Allah! No fucking religion. It’s going in the contract.
If indeed it did go ‘in the contract’ a great many of the earnest things written and said since about Dylan, Christianity, Judaism, philosophy, the trials of faith, religious art, the fate of humankind and gospel music might deserve to be erased. No one need go that far. Demonstrably, the artist did not abandon his complicated beliefs. Did he get his company orders, however? In Napier-Bell’s account the orders could not have been more explicit. And did Dylan obey Asher in exchange for 20 million pieces of silver? One reading of the Infidels lyrics says that might well have been the case. Napier-Bell’s ability to give a verbatim account of things allegedly said better than a quarter of a century before their transcription verges on the supernatural, of course. Nevertheless, the gist is clear enough. With a witness present, one of the top men at his record company gave it to Dylan straight: ‘no fucking religion’, not if he wanted a $20 million deal. You could call that interesting.
What can be said with certainty is that after Shot of Love he began to write about matters of religion in a manner that would not be confused easily with religious writing. He hid his meaning and purpose, hid them well enough to fool a lot of critics and, presumably, executives so dim-witted they could tell him to stick with Judaism ‘for Christ’s sake’.17 That happened to be the artist’s intention, more or less. Napier-Bell would further observe, dryly, that as a devout atheist he had no personal objections to Asher’s rant, though ‘it seemed tough that a contract should include such specific restrictions’. That, nevertheless, was his description of the exchange. If it was accurate, Dylan began to record Infidels under the thumb of a corporate lawyer type whom the English observer called ‘a very dull man indeed’.
Some details can be added. When the album was almost complete, for example, the artist would make several statements to the journalist Martin Keller that were markedly less forthright than before. Almost defiantly, Dylan would assert that Shot of Love was his favourite among all the albums, that the song of the same name was his ‘most perfect song’, that it defined him and showed anyone who was interested where his ‘sympathies’ lay. Despite ‘Neighborhood Bully’ and ‘Union Sundown’, he would also maintain, in the familiar manner, that ‘I don’t write political songs. Political songs are slogans. I don’t even know the definition of politics.’ When the talk turned to the issue of religion, on the other hand, Dylan would become downright evasive. Whether thanks to Asher’s expletives or to his own evolving beliefs, his opinions would not be calculated to please the holy rollers of the Vineyard church, or the ascetic rebbes of Chabad-Lubavitch. They would cheer a lot of his old fans, however.
You can turn anything into a religious context. Religion is a dirty word. It doesn’t mean anything. Coca-Cola is a religion. Oil and steel are a religion. In the name of religion, people have been raped, killed and defiled. Today’s religion is tomorrow’s bondage.18
Faith was not denied, never that, but it was given the kind of spin to which faithless, secular types could assent without turning a hair. Dylan would perform the same trick with nuance when asked about the search, if any, for his Jewish identity. ‘My so-called Jewish roots are in Egypt,’ he would say. ‘They went down there with Joseph, and they came back out with Moses …’
Am I looking for them? Well, I don’t know. I ain’t looking for them in synagogues with six-pointed Egyptian stars shining down from every window, I can tell you that much.
Three months or so later, just before Infidels was due to be released, Dylan would take another crack at explaining where he stood on the issue of religious belief. He would also try to tell the Los Angeles Times why his musical ‘gospel’ moment had passed. He would not ‘disavow any of that’, but he would scarcely testify lustily for the Lord, either. Noticeably, his unfortunate if entirely unconscious habit of placing himself on the cross-but-one next to Christ would endure.
I don’t particularly regret telling people how to get their souls saved. I don’t particularly regret any of that. Whoever was supposed to pick it up, picked it up. But maybe the time for me to say that has just come and gone. Now it’s time for me to do something else … It’s like sometimes these things appear very quickly and disappear. Jesus himself only preached for three years.19
If he did win a contract worth $4 million an album, Dylan spent some of the money wisely. In addition to Knopfler and his colleagues he invited Mick Taylor, the best guitarist the Rolling Stones ever had, to join him at the Power Station. The two had been friends for a while, probably having met at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles in January 1982 when Taylor was performing in a Bluesbreakers reunion tour with John Mayall and Fleetwood Mac’s John McVie. The blues guitar player was a good choice to support and complement Knopfler. Dylan’s next smart move was to call up Lowell ‘Sly’ Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, drums and bass respectively, a pair already long established as the rhythmic heart of modern reggae. All in all, it was a crew few recording artists could match, or afford to match.
At least 16 new Bob Dylan songs were recorded during the Infid
els sessions amid the usual plethora of cover versions, traditional numbers, jams and phantom titles. Eight tracks would survive to give a vinyl album the near-standard duration of almost forty-two minutes. Of the eight original songs discarded, two would be retrieved for later albums, in one case because the artist was by then desperate enough to risk the woeful number entitled ‘Death Is Not the End’. (Listen to it once or twice and you begin to pray for an end that is certain and swift.) The second tune reserved for recycling, ‘Clean-Cut Kid’, was a kind of mid-period sub-Dylan protest song to do with the malign effects of a wicked society on the innocent mentioned in the title – ‘they made a killer out of him’ – that did not detain the artist for long in 1983 and would never amount to much. Of the remaining half-dozen works, one piece was entitled ‘Julius and Ethel’, a song recalling the notorious Rosenberg case and the Brooklyn couple’s execution in 1953 for espionage. These days there is little doubt that Julius attempted to pass America’s nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union; his wife’s guilt is less certain. In the 1980s, nevertheless, arguments over the case were still dividing opinion between left and right. Dylan took the accurate if uncomplicated view that the 1950s had been a weird and paranoid time in which America became a strange, bewildered and fearful place, but his song was no ‘Hurricane’, nor even a ‘George Jackson’. The author has never sanctioned its release in any form and its existence is not acknowledged by bobdylan.com. That might simply be because it is not a good song. ‘Juvenile’ would be one description.
Now that they are gone, you know, the truth it can be told;
They were sacrificial lambs in the market place sold –
Julius and Ethel, Julius and Ethel.
Now that they are gone, you know, the truth it can come out;
They were never proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt –
Julius and Ethel, Julius and Ethel.
That left five tracks. Versions of each would turn up on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 in 1991, but that release would not solve the puzzle of what Dylan had done to Infidels. Two songs, ‘Lord Protect My Child’ and ‘Tell Me’, probably deserved to wind up on a ‘rare and unreleased’ compilation; two more, ‘Foot of Pride’ and ‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’, should be listed on the charge sheet among the bigger crimes of omission the artist has committed. Even these lapses are dwarfed by the failure to allow the release in 1983 of the song called ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Its absence from Infidels has set Dylan against everyone who has ever heard the work and bothered to pass comment. At the time, Mark Knopfler, fighting hard for the song, was aghast. His opinion still wins the listener’s vote. Fans and those who write about Dylan meanwhile debate whether ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was just the best thing he did in the 1980s or among the best things he has ever done. In that context, discussions of whether the version captured on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 is slightly superior or mildly inferior to a widely circulated, frighteningly powerful ‘electric’ rendition feel like casuistry.
Perhaps the real judgement on the artist is this: anyone who wants to hear how Infidels could (or should) have turned out has no choice but to reassemble the album from a range of sources, as though from spare parts. In this day and age, that’s no big deal. It was not especially difficult in the 1980s to hunt down outtakes and alternate takes: the better-known ‘acoustic’ version of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ was doing the rounds within a year of Infidels being released. The point is that Dylan is supposed to be known as a maker of albums as well as of songs, of artefacts with an artistic coherence and a considered design. The making of albums might be redundant in a pick-and-mix digital era, but it has been Dylan’s line of work for half a century. If Infidels had been a painting he would have stood accused of putting a boot through the canvas.20
As it was, he shredded his entire artistic scheme for the sake of one track, ‘Union Sundown’, mourning the fact that the land of the free market was losing out in capitalism’s race to the bottom. The song was an alert anticipation of globalisation and its discontents, but it was no ‘Blind Willie McTell’. Few of Dylan’s works save, perhaps, ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘All Along the Watchtower’ are as instantly haunting as this.
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying ‘This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem’
I travelled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
It sounds at first like an evocation of the Passover story in the Book of Exodus. Egypt is the land condemned to suffer ten plagues; the Israelite slaves are meanwhile instructed to mark out their homes with a lamb’s blood so that God will spare them. As Exodus 12:7 has it: ‘And they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side posts and on the upper door post of the houses …’ It could also be that Dylan has in mind the ‘hobo signs’ that were common during the Depression. These were the crude, coded marks left by rambling men in chalk or coal on fences, walls and doors to guide their comrades. A circle with an arrow through it meant ‘Don’t go this way’. Two parallel arrows across the circle said ‘Get out fast’.
A third possibility is that with the phrase ‘this land is condemned’ Dylan is making poetic use of a common piece of legalese. By the right of eminent domain – in Britain, by the right of compulsory purchase – authorities acquire private land for public use, but only after it has first been ‘condemned’. In the nineteenth century, the ruthless hustlers who built America’s railroads got their hands on this useful power and abused it mightily. In Dylan’s context it has more to do with what became of African Americans and their farms in the Southern states after the Civil War as vengeful whites, deprived of their plantations and their slave economy, set about subjugating and robbing blacks once more. The land earned by the sweat of newly freed slaves who had dreamed of their ‘40 acres and a mule’ was stolen wholesale. If legalised theft didn’t do the trick, though often enough it was sufficient, the Klan and the lynch mob were at hand.21
Dylan being Dylan, it is better than possible that all three ideas are concentrated in a few words. Thus: a land condemned by God because of slavery; a land where it is dangerous to stray; a land stolen from its people. At the heart of ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is a meditation on what became of America thanks to the war between the states and the causes of that war. So the writer lifts us aloft in a few bare lines to look down on a landscape somewhere, at some shifting point in time, in the American South.
There are places called Jerusalem, most of them vanishingly small, dotted throughout the region – in Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee – and beyond. Nat Turner, leader of a slave revolt in 1831, was executed at one such town (since renamed Courtland) in Virginia’s Southampton County. Equally, the biblical allusion could be straightforward, intended to encompass the entire Judaeo-Christian world. It’s more likely that everything lying between a city of sin and the city of God has been condemned. Then, as though a movie camera has soared and dipped, we are in the dark lands of East Texas, ‘where many martyrs fell’. A song making a connection between the treatment of black Americans and enslaved Israelites, as many spirituals did, has plenty of history on its side. In this verse, Dylan might also have had in mind ‘Fallen’, a well-known (if very bad) nineteenth-century poem by the once-popular lecturer and hymnist John Lawson Stoddard. The horrors inflicted by lynch mobs are central to its theme. (Stoddard was also an early advocate of the Jewish right of return to Israel, interestingly enough.) In part, ‘Fallen’ runs:
Where history’s Martyr dared to break
The power that held a race in chains,
I see the ghastly lynching-stake,
Where brutal mobs their vengeance take,
And, since no law their course restrains,
Gloat o’er their writhing victim’s pains.
Where racism was concerned, the hi
story of East Texas from the post-Civil War Reconstruction to the middle of the twentieth century was as vile as any among the Southern states. As one scholar explains, ‘At the dawn of the twentieth century, East Texas was notorious for lynching and was considered one of the worst regions in the state, leading the state in 1908 with 24 deaths.’ In 1910, when Blind Willie McTell was a child, ‘more than 100 blacks had been lynched in the Lone Star State’.22 Most died in East Texas, it is explained, in an area which then stood third among those regions of the United States in which lynchings were commonplace. After Mississippi and Georgia, where McTell was born, Texas as a whole was the state that gave itself over most eagerly to lynch law, accounting for 468 victims between 1885 and 1942.23
This, dense with history, thick with connections, is just the first verse. Dylan has here embarked on the kind of historical writing that would become a distinguishing glory of his later career, his era of consuming interest falling – very broadly speaking – in the years from the Civil War to the undated orphan birth of the blues. When he cast the song aside he would lose the thread he had discovered in ‘Blind Willie McTell’ for the best part of a decade. He would pick up this narrative again only when he remembered the art of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’, as the fascinating sleeve notes to 1993’s World Gone Wrong would explain.