Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan
Page 38
Dylan’s mention of these entertaining folk myths could be ignored as just another of his vague explanations for the creative process were it not for the quantity of things he seemed capable of believing in 1983. His interviewer was told that ‘Jokerman’ is ‘very mystical’, as indeed it is. In the islands, the ‘shapes there, and shadows, seem to be so ancient’, Dylan said. But then he seemed to say that the spirits themselves had ‘sorta inspired’ the song. Even for him, that was fanciful. Yet when he had been asked by another journalist not long before if he believed in reincarnation, this same writer had answered, ‘Yeah, I do. I don’t think there are any new souls on earth.’30 It was not the first time he had affirmed such a belief. So what did he not believe? The chances of laughing all of this off as a playful Dylan hoax diminish slightly when you realise that he was talking about jumbees just after insisting, in the same interview, that the Bible is the literal truth and that ‘the battle of Armageddon definitely will be fought in the Middle East’.
You needn’t take him seriously – or the jumbees might get you – but it is worth pausing to think about what might have been going on in the mind of the author of ‘Jokerman’. With that exercise complete, you can ask how such a very strange concatenation of beliefs, ideas, images and emotions could result in a song that is as powerful as any Dylan ever recorded. If what goes into a piece of work is any guide to what comes out, ‘Jokerman’ should be no better than the usual ‘mystical’ prophetic nonsense. Instead, the song is potent enough to make you think twice about the allure of apocalyptic myth, messiahs false and real, and what evil means to those who daily detect its existence on every side. Dylan made art from the oddest materials.
The Jokerman has various guises: born with a snake in each fist, shedding his skins, ‘a man of the mountains’, a cloud walker, a benign demagogue, a twister of dreams, yet a ‘Friend to the martyr, a friend to the woman of shame’. Fair of face, worthy indeed of a Michelangelo, yet obedient only to ‘The law of the jungle and the sea’, the Jokerman rides a milky white steed and bears witness to a world tearing itself apart amid ‘Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks / Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain’. This joker also witnesses the birth of the Antichrist:
It’s a shadowy world,
Skies are slippery grey
A woman just gave birth to a prince today
And dressed him in scarlet
He’ll put the priest in his pocket,
Put the blade to the heat
Take the motherless children off the street
And place them at the feet of the harlot
This is Revelation for the 32-track age, for the video age. With Infidels, in fact, Dylan acknowledged the existence of newly born MTV and the advent of the promotional clip. In the film for ‘Jokerman’ he supplied, among other things, the basis for what remains one of the most arresting examples of a peculiar genre, even if he did keep his eyes tight shut for most of the movie. Images and his lyrics emblazoned across the images communicated ideas in a dizzying rush: Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait as Christ, a Turner, two Michelangelos, William Blake, Hieronymus Bosch, Picasso, Georgia O’Keefe, Munch and varieties of primitive art. Amid it all were newsreels and still photographs from a troubled world: dead Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Ronald Reagan mocked, the first American combat troops into Vietnam, a nuclear blast, and mankind making its big mistake by ‘touching the moon’.
One set of verses from the song was reserved for a series of images of all the previous Bob Dylans. The artist was not entirely happy with the notion that a photograph could illustrate even a single ambiguous line from a song, but he played along. You sense that, grumbling or not, he knew what he was doing. Even if the video’s ‘concept’ was not his – George Lois, the advertising man who had fought so hard for Rubin Carter, deserved most of the credit – the conjunctions between life and art were surely no coincidence. The folk singer, the artist of 1965–6, the creator of Rolling Thunder: on the TV screen, one identity followed another.
So swiftly the sun
Sets in the sky
You rise up and say goodbye
To no one
Fools rush in
Where angels fear to tread
Both of their futures,
So full of dread,
You don’t show one
Shedding off
One more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead
Of the persecutor within
Perhaps because of the video, or perhaps because he has so often been represented as a trickster, image manipulator and inveterate myth-maker, ‘Jokerman’ has sometimes been taken as Dylan’s song about his own legend, a track intermingled with a certain scepticism, all of a sudden, towards Christ’s active role, if any, in the world. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that the number could cover all those bases. When this messiah witnesses the arrival of the Antichrist, the Deceiver, He seems utterly passive.
Oh, Jokerman,
You know what he wants
Oh, Jokerman,
You don’t show any response
If this is the usual Jesus, He isn’t doing His job. If this is Dylan getting carried away with his Christ-fixation, meanwhile, it all makes precious little sense, even given the endlessly perplexing nature of the song. It might be better to ask, first, why ‘Jokerman’, then to ask why, chorus after chorus, the incarnated, uninvolved deity would ‘dance to the nightingale tune’.
Perhaps because this a song about gods, not God, a song about humanity’s ability to touch the divine without hope of a guarantee that this world will be spared its usual biblical fate. Christ, if Christ it is, has a lot of humanity in him in ‘Jokerman’. He also carries the traces of many of the gods worshipped by man before the nativity. He dances? That’s an ancient idea. Those Caribbean spirits who ‘sorta inspired’ Dylan took (or take) possession of people during frenzied dances. Divine madness achieved in dancing is a notion common to cultures around the world. The old English carol, medieval in origin, called ‘Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day’ took this stately notion and presented a Jesus whose entire time on earth could be understood as an enactment of a celestial dance. The modern hymn, ‘Lord of the Dance’, simply exploits the conceit. In fourteenth-century England, they sang:
Before Pilate the Jews me brought,
Where Barabbas had deliverance;
They scourged me and set me at nought,
Judged me to die to lead the dance.
Then on the cross hanged I was,
Where a spear my heart did glance;
There issued forth both water and blood,
To call my true love to my dance.
Dylan’s Jokerman has within him the tension Nietzsche perceived between the Apollonian and Dionysian, order and disorder, law and misrule, intellect and instinct, mind and body. This god-figure dances to keep the world turning, dances to a tune supplied by John Keats and poetry’s nightingale. Meanwhile, He stands on water, walks on cloud and avails himself of whatever human vice is to be had in Sodom and Gomorrah. Freedom, of that variety, is ‘just around the corner’. Yet still, ‘with the truth so far off, what good will it do?’ The same figure is simultaneously obedient to ‘the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy’, Judaism’s rule books, and to ‘the law of the jungle and the sea’ underpinning earthly existence. Necessary order and divine disorder: the human dialectic. But still, how could a messiah be a joker?
Dylan has been at his Tarot again. This time there is not much ambiguity about the hand played, but the pillaging of the esoteric deck has interesting resonances within the song. In the standard Rider-Waite pack the Joker is known as the Fool, numbered zero if he is numbered at all. In older French and Italian sets of cards the Fool was rendered as some version of ‘Madman’. The figure was depicted, furthermore, either as a kind of holy fool, divinely deranged, or as the ragged Wildman of the Woods, the last descendant of pagan Dionysus. Commonly, even today, the Fool is shown as the
possessor of a small dog. So:
Resting in the fields,
Far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars
With a small dog licking your face
Near the stars might allude neatly to Oscar Wilde’s boast on behalf of those who rest in the gutter yet can see beyond grim reality; of the wee dog, there can surely be little doubt. Yet how would that fit with Dylan-plays-Christ? The former has kept dogs (rarely small) but Scripture makes no mention of Jesus in the company of pets beyond the familiar texts on sheep, lambs and straying flocks. The hound is in the song for a reason, nevertheless, and it can only be a Tarot-related reason. It is certainly a fact that the animal is present in an alternate ‘Jokerman’ take, one that gathers the Fool and his Dionysian antecedents together. As Dylan sings in this earlier, better version:
So drunk, standing in the middle of the street
Directing traffic, with a small dog at your feet
Perhaps he’s just fond of animals and gave us a Tarot joke to be going on with, interpreting until kingdom come. There are several points of difference between the two versions of the song, nevertheless, and one of these indicates a fascinating moment when the writer clearly had second thoughts about the truth he meant to convey. In the track as released, the earthly struggle between good and evil is conveyed as follows:
Well, the rifleman’s stalking
The sick and the lame
Preacherman seeks the same
Who’ll get there first is uncertain
On the bootlegs, meanwhile, Dylan can be heard to sing:
Well, a preacherman talkin’
’Bout the deaf and the dumb
And a world to come
That’s already been pre-determined
There were sound and obvious metrical reasons for getting rid of ‘pre-determined’. By the time he settled on his preferred version, however, Dylan might also have decided – indeed, did decide – that he had no wish to pursue the kind of basic theological point that was otherwise transubstantiated meat and drink to the evangelicals. Whether he was heeding Dick Asher’s alleged $20-million threats or changing his own way of thinking, whether he had returned to secular views or not (not), there is a world of difference, in fact and logic, between what is pre-determined and what is uncertain.
There is plenty of doubt in ‘Jokerman’. That’s what helps to make it a great Bob Dylan song. The doubt is neither existential nor cosmological. For the artist, the fundamental issues had been settled, once and for all, before 1983. But in this song he is asking learned questions. What is a god who becomes a man and lives among men? What difference does it make to the existence of men? How does a messiah function ‘when He returns’ and the Antichrist is disguised by good deeds and clad in the scarlet of the Whore of Babylon? (Revelation 17:4: ‘And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication.’) In Dylan’s belief, Christ does not, because He cannot, ‘show any response’.
Give the writer credit for audacity, despite it all. As albums containing ‘no fucking religion’ go, Infidels opens with a remarkable piece of work, a marvellous machine made of interlocking rhymes, rhythmic pulses and transcendent singing. Soon enough, people would be wondering what became of that Bob Dylan.
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Some of the reviews for the album wouldn’t help. In New York’s Village Voice (29 November 1983), quantifying artistic success and failure with a helpful B-minus on his critic’s pocket calculator, Robert Christgau would judge that the artist had managed a ‘complexity of tone’ but nevertheless ‘turned into a hateful crackpot’ with his lectures on industrial relations, Israel and the risks of space travel. ‘Jokerman’ would not even be mentioned by the voice of the Voice. Others, such as the reviewer for Rolling Stone, were cheered by the album, excessively so, but the Christgau view would not disappear. Michael Gray, that most notable of writers on Dylan, grants everything to the opening track, but still finds Infidels giving off ‘feigned emotion wrapped in a fog of mere professional competence’. As for the artist, Gray has written, this ‘dissembling demeans him’. The album is ‘a small, shifty failure’, failing ‘in a small-minded, cheating way’.31
Such talk might be enough to persuade the unwary to prefer Saved and Shot of Love. That would be a big mistake. Those who greeted Infidels as a relief and heard its merits were not so far wrong. It would be a long while before they were again allowed even a notable-if-shifty failure from this artist. Nevertheless, the largest and most important fact, then as now, was that Dylan disfigured one of his better efforts in the studios for reasons that even he has struggled to explain. Mark Knopfler went off to Europe on tour with his band and the artist was left alone to overdub, mix the album and make his own choices. They were bad choices. Afterwards, Knopfler would be baffled, dismayed and just a little peeved by what became of all his exertions on behalf of Infidels. Once again, Dylan’s attitude towards his own work raised questions. Did he know what he was doing? More to the point, did he know why?
No tour was planned for 1983. Dylan went back to Malibu, messed around with some young local musicians and in March 1984 put in an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman. The performance was both chaotic – for want of the right harmonica the singer was momentarily lost – and enthralling. The video for ‘Jokerman’ had been released during the previous month to much media chatter and acclaim. Predictably, the version of the song thrashed out for the TV audience with just bass, drums and guitar by Dylan and three under-rehearsed youngsters was barely a second cousin to the album track. The artist seemed invigorated, nevertheless, by his pick-up band and the company of a new generation of musicians.
Nothing came of it. Those four words could stand as the epitaph for most of Dylan’s endeavours in the years ahead.
CHAPTER NINE
World Gone Wrong
THE CLEVER COMMERCIAL MOVE WOULD HAVE BEEN TO FOLLOW Infidels in short order with another polished, professional and mostly ‘secular’ album, one laying to rest the obnoxious allegation put about by supercilious hacks that Bob Dylan had suffered a midlife creative crisis. In theory, such a task should have posed no serious challenge. Four albums had appeared in just over four years since the release of Slow Train Coming in August 1979. They had ranged from decent to dreadful, but a song such as ‘Jokerman’ demonstrated even to the artist’s worst enemies among the critics that, despite everything, his essential talent was intact. In his born-again moment he had been furiously productive. What hindered Dylan now? There was surely no good reason to doubt that he could deliver product if required. Infidels had meanwhile repaired most of the damage done by Saved and Shot of Love, reaching number twenty in America and number nine in Britain. Columbia had recouped a large part of whatever vast sum they had paid out for a five-album contract. There was a moment to be seized.
It didn’t happen. Some 13 long months would elapse between the appearance of Infidels and a new Dylan album. The artefact when it arrived would amount to little more than a stopgap, a desperately poor one at that. Real Live would seem only to justify the perennial suspicion among fans that cynical performers stick out concert albums when they have nothing better to offer. Dylan’s effort would be treated with the disdain it deserved – even the title would seem lazy – but miserable sales figures would not spur him into action. Evidence for a loss of appetite, interest, will, desire, concentration and creativity would mount. Another seven months would go by after Real Live before Dylan’s twenty-third studio album reached the stores. Celebrations would be muted when they were even audible. All the ground regained with Infidels would be lost, and lost, so it would seem, irretrievably. Even the last of all possible excuses, ‘better than nothing’, would be hard to sustain. And the album called Empire Burlesque would not be the worst of it.
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For some who remember the period, the 1980s tend to cal
l W.H. Auden’s contemptuous epitaph for the ’30s to mind. Here was another ‘low, dishonest decade’, its clever hopes soon expired. If the coke habits, booze, ugly fashions, ostentatious wealth and gaudy politics of the few were insufficiently distracting, the ’80s counted for everyone else as a time when it made rational sense to be uncertain and afraid amid global ‘waves of anger and fear’.1 It was a decade that seemed to baffle Dylan even as it all but destroyed him as a writer.
Both America and Britain had acquired right-wing governments as conservative as any they had seen. The absolutist free-market policies promoted by these administrations would make a minority rich and leave the majority to worry about jobs and the uncertainties of a post-industrial world. Both countries had elected leaders, in Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with a marked taste for Cold War rhetoric and an eagerness to risk a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Both leaders liked to preach a stern economic discipline that somehow they failed to practise. While increasing the defence expenditure of the United States by 40 per cent in real terms between 1981 and 1985, Reagan, that enemy of ‘public spending’, was piling up the national debt as though assembling an oozing toxic layer cake. No matter how hard he hacked away at the programmes intended to aid the poor, the Republican president could not balance the books. By the time he left office early in 1989, the debt burden would have almost tripled, from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. While the better-off were enjoying his tax cuts and Infidels was being released, the unemployment rate in 1983 for ordinary Americans, according to the official numbers, was touching 10.4 per cent. By borrowing to cover Reagan’s budget deficit, their country had become the biggest debtor the world had seen. Times had indeed changed.