Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan
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Unabashed neo-liberalism had arrived in the democracies of the West. Country to country, the family resemblance was unmistakable. Trade unions, the public realm, left-idealism under the banner of the bleeding heart, the ‘permissive society’: these were to be prepared for history’s dustbin. To justify an agreeable theory, Thatcher’s British ‘economic miracle’ had torn the vitals out of manufacturing and turned the country into a net importer of goods for the first time. In January 1982, if you believed figures based on ever-changing, politically useful methods of calculation, the average rate of joblessness in the United Kingdom was 12.5 per cent. In the old industrial regions of the country, one in five were out of work. In the most afflicted areas, the figures were still worse as Thatcher prepared to pick a fight with Britain’s coal miners and divide her country utterly. Dylan might have tired of ‘issues’ – though ‘Union Sundown’ had seemed to say otherwise – but he could not ignore the world in which he found himself. He could try, though.
On one reading of events, the advent of Reagan and Thatcher was proof enough that the progressive forces which once had claimed Dylan as a figurehead had failed completely. Not a lot of overcoming had been done by those who liked to sing reassuring anthems. The ‘foes’ mentioned in the youth’s ‘When the Ship Comes In’ when he performed the song at the Washington civil rights march in August 1963 had not chosen to ‘raise their hands / Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands’. Moreover, Reagan and Thatcher were the democratic choices of their peoples, elected and re-elected. The only alternative explanation, still being heard more than 20 years after those early-’60s songs, was that the battle had been lost because Dylan and others besides had deserted the fight. The criticism could have been developed further. By the early ’80s born-again Bob had seemed to forget even the reasons for the conflict. Where morality was concerned, especially the moral failure he defined as sin, that Dylan had been on the side of the conservatives. The single telling fact might be that such insights, if insights they were, had done his art no good.
In music, as in real life, the 1980s were proving to be a charmless decade. If, for argument’s sake, year zero was 1956 and the Big Bang in a small universe the release of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, maximum entropy was achieved within three decades. What began with Elvis Presley at an afternoon recording session on Nashville’s McGavock Street on 10 January in ’56 was over and done, never to be renewed, when Dylan was releasing Empire Burlesque and preparing the folly he would call Knocked Out Loaded. Presley had brought him to consciousness as a 14-year-old. A decade later Dylan was contending with the hanging judges at the Manchester Free Trade Hall. A decade after that, barely a month before the anniversary of the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ session, he was on stage at Madison Square Garden in New York, singing for the freedom of Hurricane Carter. Yet by the time one more decade had elapsed Dylan would be telling a journalist from the Australian TV programme 60 Minutes that he didn’t know much about anything. By the sound of things, he wouldn’t care a great deal either.
In January 1986, the programme’s George Negus would ask the artist if the times had truly changed as once he had predicted. The answer: ‘I don’t know. I’ve no answer.’ Had he believed, then, in the imminence of those great changes when he wrote the song? ‘I would have no way of knowing,’ replied the oracle. His religion, Dylan would claim, ‘has more to do with playing the guitar’. As to possessing anything as risky as an actual opinion about anything at all, the response from this fin de siècle performing artist would be worthy of a suspect under interrogation, or of a coma victim regaining consciousness. ‘I mean,’ he would say, ‘it would be pointless for me to go out and say how I feel about this and how I feel about that.’
One popular theory, attractive because it is impossible to prove, holds that everything Elvis began ended with punk. The rest, including Dylan’s career from the mid-1980s onwards, has been a dull, irrelevant footnote, or a species of nostalgia. The explosive energy of the primeval moment had dissipated by the time the ’80s arrived; the music, as one of the singer-songwriters Dylan permitted said, had ‘died’. So the story goes. But the belief that pop was flawless and unimpeachable once upon a time is founded on a myth. The idea that innovation ended was being mocked by new-school hip hop even as Dylan was turning Infidels into a jigsaw with most of the important pieces missing.
The 1980s were peculiarly decadent, much of the time, for reasons of their own. Some of it had to do with the nature of that low, dishonest decade; some of it had to do with the likes of Dylan and his surviving contemporaries, the odd species known as rock stars, befuddled people with too much money and too little remaining artistic sense. Music was in decline in the middle of the 1980s for the simple and profound reason that those who had once made the great records settled for inferior stuff, even risible stuff. The buying public seemed to have no complaints, after all.
In Britain in 1984 Paul McCartney would score a number one with ‘Pipes of Peace’; Stevie Wonder would do the same with ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’. Lionel Richie would enjoy a gargantuan British hit with the frankly creepy and musically redundant ‘Hello’. Most of the rest would involve drum machines, Wham! and Duran Duran. If Dylan was in need of a hint, meanwhile, the essential American response in 1984 would be Bruce Springsteen’s vastly successful valediction to the Vietnam generation and their music, Born in the USA. That album would sell more copies, upwards of 15 million of them, than most of Dylan’s releases put together. He had always been a minority taste. In 1984, he seemed determined to stretch the definition of that category to its limits.
In a suddenly conservative world, a subgenus of the self-involved called yuppies occupied a lot of column inches and airtime. Credit and the consumption justified by credit were the new preoccupations of those in work and, as they perceived it, on top of the heap. There was a lot of talk, on both sides of the Atlantic, about individualism and liberty, rather less about communities and freedom. In this era, Reagan and his bosom friend Thatcher shared a taste for moralistic homilies. They seemed to stress that any difficulties in life were due to personal character flaws, or to a society that had lost its ‘values’.
This kind of conservatism could be comical, never more so than in 1987 when a wandering right-wing academic named Allan Bloom would decide that America had boarded the handcart to hell because its colleges had succumbed to relativism and the exotic allure – Thomas Jefferson was not available for comment – of Enlightenment thought. Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, would provide an emblematic cultural moment by picking on music, ‘rock music’ that is, as the reason for young America’s ‘spiritual void’ and the failure of youth to attend to all the things Allan Bloom had to say about the books Allan Bloom had decided were eternally canonical. To read The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 was like spinning a dial and picking up 1957, loud and clear. Rock music, Bloom wrote in the ’80s, ‘has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire – not love, not eros – but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored’.2 It was, indeed, ‘the beat of sexual intercourse’ and it was helping to lay waste the nation’s intellectual capacities, its capitalism and its democracy. Bloom would have Plato and Nietzsche on his side, whether they knew it or not, but he would make no mention of Bob Dylan. The book was a big success, meanwhile. In its aftermath, as one journal would record, ‘Conservative cultural commentators burst forth from all corners, rhetorical cudgels in hand.’ Their list of pernicious trends ‘was long and varied: political correctness, multi-culturalism, deconstruction, cultural and moral relativism, feminism, rock & roll, television, the legacy of the Sixties …’3
That last decade was long over and done, as the artist knew better than most. The 1970s had given him a tantalising encore. In the 1980s, most of the time, he would struggle and fail to find a Bob Dylan adequate to the occasion. That once reliable conveyor belt of identities had ground to a halt. Suddenly his art, what remained of it, had neither purpose nor meaning.
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So much was evident during a brief, catastrophic European tour, the last Dylan would countenance before the early weeks of 1986. The only apparent motives for this 1984 exercise were the sums of money that could be taken on the gate at big football stadiums and Olympic arenas across the continent. Band introductions aside, Dylan barely spoke a word to the vast crowds. The veteran musical crew assembled by Mick Taylor might have been designed, meanwhile, to illustrate just how redundant this version of ‘rock’ had become. As often as not, the hired hands had no idea what Dylan intended to play on a given night and no understanding of how, if at all, they were supposed to follow his butterfly instincts. For whatever reason, Carlos Santana and his band were hired as one support act; Joan Baez as another. Soon disillusioned, yet again, she failed to stay the course. Later, the experience would be recalled as ‘one of the most demoralising series of events I’ve ever lived through’. Baez would also record how it felt to be groped, it seems for old time’s sake, by an enervated, half-aware superstar whose character she could barely recognise.4
Dylan was knocking out old hits for big money, yet talking, when he deigned to talk, as though he lived for art alone. On 27 June, in a café in Madrid, he would tell Mick Brown of England’s Sunday Times that ‘I don’t think I’m gonna be really understood until maybe 100 years from now’.5 The next night he would be doing ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and all the other old songs he had begun to regard as perfunctory offerings to those who still thought it a treat to glimpse from several hundred yards’ distance someone who might once have been Bob Dylan. The ‘stadium-rock experience’ was another of those 1980s phenomena to which he had consented. Here was the deified artist, beyond reach and almost beyond sight; here too were the multitudes who would take what they were given. Any belief in the communicative function and power of art and artist was boiled away while the band, the contract labour, played on.
By the time the tour reached the inverted pit of London’s Wembley Stadium on 7 July, Dylan was littering his stage with ‘guest stars’. An honest groundling might have glimpsed Van Morrison, or heard a guitar that might have been played by Eric Clapton. The alert ticket-holder probably noticed that the artist had messed around with the words to ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and, as ever, decided that ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ stood in need of revision. The worth of all this would be revealed when Real Live, with tracks recorded in London, Newcastle and Dublin, was released in November of the year. It is possible, just about, to argue that the album does not represent the better moments of the tour, but it still gives a fair account of the average show in Europe in ’84. American record-buyers – which is to say non-buyers – would make Real Live the least successful of all of Bob Dylan’s albums. Number 115 on the Billboard chart would be its reward and its requiem.
Back in America, he returned to the studios and began the long, tedious process of casting around for inspiration in the hope that an album would emerge. Songs, suddenly, were coming hard, but that was not the whole story. The fact that Dylan’s very first studio sessions would revolve around material that had found no place on Infidels was revealing. The fact that he tried (and failed) to make something out of ‘Clean-Cut Kid’ rather than ‘Foot of Pride’ or ‘Blind Willie McTell’ is beyond curious. It was as though he no longer understood how a great song sounded.
The standard excuse for Dylan’s working methods, an excuse he has used often enough in his own defence, is that he does not return to the scene of previous defeats. If a song is deemed a failure, he forgets it and moves on. In Dylan’s telling of the legend, fantastic unheard works float between possible universes. With Empire Burlesque, nevertheless, he would return twice to the Infidels discard pile, consciously and deliberately, yet take an interest only in one fine song and one minor piece. No issue of principle as to the reuse of previous work was at stake, therefore. Dylan nevertheless took an avid interest in some songs and ignored other, better works. It is almost as if he was keeping ‘Blind Willie McTell’ in reserve for the rainiest of days.
That blasphemous suggestion can be heard among fans, now and then. The basic allegation, the conspiracy within the grand conspiracy, is that Dylan’s many outtakes, known to the world of ‘collectors’ almost from the instant a recording console switch is reset, are no accident, that since the Bootleg Series he has salted tracks away for the sake of a secondary, if highly profitable, outlet. This, it is argued, is how he allows himself to think twice, to make amends, and to take no responsibility for what might have gone wrong with all those ‘official’ albums. With the Bootleg Series as a safety net, there is no longer a pressure to get things right first time around. All albums become, in a sense, provisional. A judicious release of outtakes can repair the reputational damage of any number of past failures. A new album can be revised, in effect, almost as soon as it has been released. It is a pleasing idea, but silly. No one wastes material the way Dylan has wasted material, sometimes in moments of dire need, if his calculations are so cold-blooded. Equally, no one has worked as he has worked, amid a virtual posterity, for quite so long.
So: when did discussions truly begin over the creation of the Biograph box set, the one that would be released to the world at the end of October (or the beginning of November) in 1985? When did Dylan, who had failed for years to make anything useful out of the basement tapes, decide to feed on his own corpus? A great deal of work on copyrights and permissions, not to mention a lot of archival labour and audio restoration, must have been undertaken before the ‘unprecedented retrospective’ (and so forth) Biograph collection of five vinyl discs or three CDs gained Columbia’s approval. A certain amount of thought on the artist’s part must also have taken place. The first of the big, lucrative box sets dedicated to a living artist, a concept that would give the music industry a second lease on life, didn’t just happen.
Dylan’s tendency to regard himself and his work as entities existing outside the present moment has never been accidental. Equally, no one begins to curate his own life inadvertently, least of all in the trough of a writer’s despond. Yet the most remarkable sleight of hand conducted by this artist down the years has involved persuading the world (himself included, it sometimes seems) that stuff just happens. Songs somehow get written, albums somehow get made and fame – none of this is Dylan’s doing – somehow descends. Yet by allowing the Biograph set he did not just give permission for still another greatest-hits package. With this little casket he altered his perspective on his own work. In fact, he would alter everyone’s perspective, even when they thought they knew every possible angle. Accepting the past, and with it all those accumulated identities, he could never be the same unencumbered artist again. He would make a fair few bucks from Biograph, though, and go on insisting that none of it was his idea.
In the mid-1980s, no one had yet realised that you could, in essence, flog a bunch of old, near-forgotten stuff to the middle-aged demographic and screw the tape thieves, as it were, to boot. For that matter, you could repackage a career, an artist or an entire self-conscious ‘legendary’ existence. Dylan’s public position was then, as it remains, to disdain all his missing back pages. He still pretends that his hugely lucrative Bootleg Series releases have somehow just materialised while his back was turned. In November 1985, talking to Time magazine about Biograph, he would state:
It wasn’t my idea to put the record out. This record has been suggested in the past, but I guess it just didn’t come together until recently. I think it’s been in the works for like three years. I had very little to do with it. I didn’t choose the songs. A lot of people probably had a hand in it. The record company has the right to do whatever they please with the songs. I didn’t care about what was on the record. I haven’t sat down and listened to it.6
Dylan would go on to boast that if someone had made it ‘worth my while’ a compilation twice the size might have been forthcoming. It could, he said, have conta
ined nothing but his unreleased songs. In a slight if inadvertently truthful slip, however, the line about ‘the record company has the right to do whatever they please’ would be undermined by the artist’s flat statement: ‘I’m the final judge of what goes on and off my records.’ So who had sanctioned the box set? Columbia might have been entitled to another greatest-hits package, but not to Biograph. Like everyone else in his business, Dylan signs contracts. These specify the number and nature of his releases. Sony/Columbia, as the conglomerate is these days more accurately styled, cannot just empty its vaults of his material as it sees fit. To this day, the planning of Bootleg Series releases is subject to continual revision according to choices made, if the record company is to be believed, only by the artist or his representatives. If nothing else, uncertainty and fascinating rumours keep the hardcore fans interested.
Biograph had been in the planning, nevertheless, ‘for like three years’ as of November 1985. So the intention to memorialise Bob Dylan in a lavish if unproven format, if with no more than his tacit consent, had come into existence just after Shot of Love was dying its deserved death. The artist was regarding himself – his life, his writing, his career – as an artefact as early as 1982. To see his monument being erected while he was trying to make a new record, even if he ‘didn’t care’ about the contents of Biograph, must surely have had an inhibiting effect on his writing. The evidence of Dylan’s mid-1980s albums suggests that the effect was near-paralysing. Even today, the continuing archaeological excavations represented by the Bootleg Series must make for an odd existence, like reading your own obituary day after day. ‘Bob Dylan’, that mirror within a mirror, is a work forever in progress for the man who bears the name.
Back in 1985, the accusation that he aimed for a ‘disco’ sound with Empire Burlesque was perhaps the most half-witted of all the criticisms the artist has ever encountered. A lot of things can be done, no doubt, to the accompaniment of a Dylan soundtrack, but dancing has never been one of them. The same was true of the album he made in fits and starts, with a changing cast of musicians, between the summer of 1984 and March 1985. The aim was to achieve what was then a ‘contemporary’ sound with the help of the fashionable engineer and producer Arthur Baker, an individual who had worked, as Dylan was no doubt aware, with Bruce Springsteen. It is not a sound – cluttered, top-heavy, full of manipulated drum machine effects, synthesisers, horns and over-assertive bass lines – that has improved with age. It is as though a template was created before anyone listened to the songs. But then, the album itself can probably be summed up by the fact that its best track, ‘Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love)’, was in essence a leftover from Infidels.