by Bell, Ian
The Pacific leg of Dylan’s tour was brief enough. On 10 March, back in Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan hall, he was still paying tribute to ‘a guy who died pretty miserably’, but he was still talking about Lenny Bruce, not Richard Manuel. As he had on every night, the artist was still closing the main part of the show with ‘In the Garden’, a defiantly born-again song from Saved. Where religion was concerned, Dylan had reached the point of all but teasing his audiences, as though asking them to guess what he did and did not believe. Introducing this rewrite of the tale of Christ’s betrayal in Tokyo, he had talked yet again about ‘my hero’, but had also said, as though for the avoidance of doubt, ‘I write songs about all kinds of things.’ That wasn’t factually true, not any more. He was not writing any kind of song worth speaking about, far less songs worth recording.
He had always been a high-wire act. For most of his career it had been no sort of test for Dylan to enter the studios with only the bare bones of a handful of songs at his disposal. Nor had his preparedness provided any sort of guide, for him or anyone else, to the quality of the album he was liable to make. In late 1967 he had gone to Nashville with John Wesley Harding written and ready in its entirety. The album had come off beautifully. In a few days in February and March 1966, in contrast, he had kept musicians waiting for ten hours at a time in the same studios while he scribbled away to conjure up the songs for Blonde on Blonde. The result was hardly one of his lesser works. The conditions necessary for Dylan’s gift to function had rarely depended on the external circumstances in his life. If something was amiss within him, on the other hand, no amount of bravado or improvisation could redeem the work. The puzzle of the 1980s and the succession of flawed, misconceived, or simply bad albums Dylan made in that period lies in deciding what ailed him.
A complicated life? There was nothing new in that. In June of 1986 he would marry Carolyn Dennis and attempt, for a while, to straighten out his tangled existence and raise another child. Though he would make extraordinary efforts to keep wife and baby out of the public eye, he was not entirely indifferent to his responsibilities. Bad habits, then? Estranged friends and lovers, Susan Ross in particular, would later make allegations of alcoholism. Other types of possibly illegal behaviour would be, in slippery tabloid parlance, ‘rumoured’. Even if every story was true, each would amount to a small hill of beans besides the existence Dylan had endured in 1966. Blonde on Blonde had emerged from that hell. Two decades later, the only apposite word would be supplied by the French. Ennui would seem to hang over Dylan like a low, dark cloud. He had been too many people, too often. He had lost himself and recovered himself time and again, but the effort had come at a cost. If his work is any guide, it had all become familiar to him and the returns were diminishing. Even resurrection becomes repetitive, after a while: a triumph is a triumph is a triumph. The same formulation can be applied, no doubt, to catastrophe. The first best guess is that in 1986 Dylan was simply bored with his several selves, bored with the duty of creativity, jaded by spectacle, fatigued by the relentless insistence that he could exist only within the fiction of myth and legend. He had seen that movie before, more than once.
The second best guess at the reasons for Dylan’s very bad albums in the 1980s imposes a liability on God. The artist had given his all to those derided born-again albums. From where he stood, he had placed his art in the service of eternal truth and been mocked and spurned for his pains. That must have been disheartening. But Dylan’s faith had also provided him with a precise measure of what mattered in life and what did not. If you happen to believe sincerely in the Book of Revelation and imminent apocalypse, it must be difficult to take the making of an album of popular songs too seriously. Inevitably you must think that such things are, by definition, pretty trivial. If you have meanwhile given every ounce of your commitment to a profound belief and seen belief and commitment alike rejected, you might cease to give much of a damn for critics, audiences, record companies and a pop-music career founded on a burdensome media ‘myth’. The Bible said, in essence, that Bob Dylan, his ego, art and career, didn’t matter much. So why would the artist strain every nerve for the sake of a mere album?
Besides, for all their bleating and behind-the-hand carping, Columbia were never going to drop him. Biograph was the final proof of that. Even if the company never saw another chart-straddling, revolutionary album, Dylan’s back catalogue was by the middle of the ’80s a semi-official national treasure. That was the whole meaning of the box set. The fact that the artist made no money to speak of for the shareholders counted for little against his intangible but real worth as the final guarantor of Columbia’s pretensions. The bosses might not fall over themselves to promote his latest efforts, but having Dylan on the roster was a prize in itself. Executives who guaranteed his creative freedom could glow in his lustre and congratulate themselves on their discernment. Even when his work failed to justify the fond belief, he represented quality, art, class. He knew it and the suits knew it. The only fly swimming in the soothing ointment was the fact that this shared knowledge bred utter complacency.
Hence the third best guess at Dylan’s dire efforts in the 1980s: he was under no pressure whatever to succeed. None of his superstar fan-friends whispered the harsh truth about his self-evident decline. No corporate automaton asked about the meaning or purpose of the latest piece of crap to emerge from the studios. Journalists could sneer now and then. Fans could grumble at a sloppy concert while the artist, Petty and the Heartbreakers spent half the show sorting themselves out. Record-buyers could decide that the latest instalment of half-realised Dylan nonsense wasn’t worth the price being asked. But all knew, for a certainty, that he had proved them dead wrong several times before. Few wished to be behind the next curve, however he might choose to describe the arc. So Dylan was indulged. For those astonished by his behaviour, his methods and his risible output in the 1980s, it became a kind of incantation to lift all curses. ‘But,’ someone would always say, ‘he’s Bob Dylan.’
It would not be even slightly surprising, therefore, when better than two years of intermittent effort resulted finally, in July 1986, in the piece of crap he would choose to call Knocked Out Loaded.
*
In the aftermath, he would flog the legend almost to death. That was not necessarily a bad idea. If a myth was what was desired, onlookers would be given an education in how such a thing was made and unmade. He would demolish the monument. There was probably no conscious intent involved, but an act of purgation was required. Dylan would have to destroy himself utterly as a performer and as a recording artist before summoning the will, yet again, to start afresh.
He had staged a few recording sessions in California in the spring of 1986, apparently still convinced that a modern album could be made in a week. The old belief in spontaneity persisted, but apathy also exerted its enervating negative energy. The artist had put in a lot of time, by his lights, on Empire Burlesque. He had tried to make his peace with modern technology and modern techniques. Where had it got him? His 24th attempt was, in that favourite phrase, ‘just another album’, of no great importance in the cosmic scheme of things. Most of the tracks recorded at Skyline Studios in Topanga Canyon on the edge of the Santa Monica Mountains at the end of April and the beginning of May had been cover versions. There had been no other choice. Dylan had failed to come up with songs of his own that were worth the name. He had messed around instead, so it had seemed, with anything that came to mind, as though hunting for one bright needle of inspiration in a big, rickety haystack.
After close to a month’s worth of sessions, an album, a real album, had failed to materialise. Dylan had done a lot of work to no avail and a fair bit of drinking in the process, though whether for consolation or inspiration’s sake it is impossible to say. In the end, the thing he called Knocked Out Loaded – alcohol did his talking even in the title – had been compiled rather than created. Bits and pieces from previous sessions, leftovers from Empire Burlesque, cover versions: it was, s
ave in one particular, a pitiful affair. Had it not been for an eleven-minute remake of ‘New Danville Girl’ that he called ‘Brownsville Girl’, Knocked Out Loaded would have amounted to twenty-five minutes of residue containing only two poor songs, ‘Driftin’ Too Far From Shore’ and ‘Maybe Someday’, that Dylan had succeeded in writing without help. The two he had contrived with Tom Petty and the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager were equally bad. The best way to describe Knocked Out Loaded is to say that it took either nerve or sheer, demoralised indifference to release the thing. What once would have been unacceptable to the artist was by mid-1986 the best he could manage.
‘Brownsville Girl’ was the only beacon in the gathering darkness. The phenomenon it represented would become another feature of Dylan’s work in the 1980s. No matter how awful the album, there was always something, always a track or two to set you wondering what might have been. You had to be a resolute and determined fan, however, to buy an entire record for the sake of a couple of songs. By this point, most of the artist’s long-lost former admirers were not prepared to be short-changed so outrageously. Knocked Out Loaded would get no higher than number 54 in America. In Britain, where fans had been so reflexively loyal for so long, it became the first of Dylan’s works since 1973’s Dylan, a collection for which he could not be held responsible, to fail to penetrate the top 20. The British had taken Saved and Shot of Love to their trusting hearts, but not this. Those who did bother to purchase Knocked Out Loaded, the thrawn coterie who bought new Bob Dylan albums simply because they were new Bob Dylan albums, spent a long time listening, over and over, to a single track.
By one description, ‘Brownsville Girl’ is a movie within a movie about a movie. It draws a parallel between a life’s faltering memories and half-remembered films. One voice begins by talking about standing in line to see an old Gregory Peck picture, The Gunfighter (1950), and then lurches off into his own disjointed road movie, one in which stories seem to begin and fall apart time and again. Everything is visual, a mental picture: ‘I keep seeing this stuff’; ‘I can still see the day’; ‘There was a movie I seen one time’. In the original ‘New Danville Girl’ the idea was deepened, yet perhaps made too obvious, with an explicit evocation of Plato’s analogy of the cave, the philosopher’s account of how we perceive and understand reality, and a reference to people ‘busy talkin’ back and forth to our shadows on the old stone wall’. This is a song, furthermore, ‘about’ the experience of loss that connects the idea of emotional distance with physical distances travelled. Borders (and lines) are crossed. The travelling is meanwhile desperate and apparently aimless. The haunted – and hunted – couple are seen tearing over the Rockies at sunrise, driving all night to San Antonio, heading for Amarillo, in flight from the law in Corpus Christi, parting in New Orleans. All the while, the singer is drawn back to Peck’s movies, to some lost code of honour from a time ‘long before the stars were torn down’.
This recitative, sung only in choruses that seem to intervene in no fixed pattern, is beautifully written and performed, for the only time on Knocked Out Loaded, as though Dylan actually believes in the material. Great lines are scattered throughout the song. Lines such as, ‘Oh, if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.’ Lines such as, ‘The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter.’ ‘Brownsville Girl’ is arguably a lesser work than ‘New Danville Girl’, but that is ultimately a matter of disputable opinion. The production, according to taste, can sound overloaded; the backing singers – named the Queens of Rhythm by Dylan – can seem too intrusive. On the other hand, these gospel and soul performers are acting as a chorus in the Greek style: there is a point to their presence. Sometimes their mocking interventions are very funny. Dylan’s own speaking/singing is meanwhile masterly. Wonderful lines in the song only truly make sense when he delivers them. Shepard, as a playwright and scriptwriter, understood as much. At one point in the writing process, it seems, he asked wonderingly how Dylan could possibly perform the enormously long lines of ‘New Danville Girl’. The artist simply told him not to worry about it. In either version, he justifies that confidence.
Who wrote what? As with Desire and Dylan’s collaborations with Jacques Levy, it is impossible to say. Neither writer has spilled those beans. Much of the ambience of ‘Brownsville Girl’ is reminiscent of Shepard’s Motel Chronicles (1982) and of Paris, Texas (1984), the Wim Wenders movie (appropriately enough) partly inspired by the book and co-written by the playwright. Equally, much of the dialogue in the song and its delivery could be no one else but Dylan. That aspect of his art, its sheer inimitability, was what he stood to lose as he drifted rudderless through the 1980s. It would be a long time before he produced anything as fine as ‘Brownsville Girl’ again.
*
He was back on the road with Petty and the Heartbreakers in the summer of ’86. Knocked Out Loaded appeared and disappeared and no one much cared. The concerts, on the other hand, went pretty well. Dylan’s choices among his songs were odd enough to be intriguing, with everything from ‘Positively 4th Street’ to ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ surfacing alongside ‘In the Garden’ and numerous cover versions, familiar or obscure. The artist seemed to be enjoying himself, too, as though happy to be hiding out in the wide open spaces of anonymous amphitheatres. Dylan was barely a recording artist in any serious sense and had all but ceased to be a songwriter. He had reason to prefer hedonism. By no accident, a favourite encore on the tour was the venerable ‘Let the Good Times Roll’.
In the early autumn of the year he travelled to England to participate in a catastrophe of a movie entitled Hearts of Fire, a drama intended by its director, Richard Marquand, as a ‘study’ of stardom. Instead, it resembled a parody of every lame rock and roll movie cliché ever to stain celluloid, one in which Dylan played a parody of himself as the reclusive veteran superstar ‘Billy Parker’. It soon became clear that his acting had not improved much with the years, but the malformed script was no aid to performance. In America, the feature went, as industry shorthand had it, ‘straight to video’, sparing discerning customers the waste of a night out. Of more immediate importance was the fact that Dylan had agreed to come up with at least four and possibly six new and original songs for the film’s soundtrack. In the event, he managed, barely managed, just two. The best way to describe ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’ and ‘Night After Night’ is to say that they could cause you seriously to doubt that Bob Dylan actually wrote them. The second of the pair begins: ‘Night after night you wander the streets of my mind.’
Towards the end of the Hearts of Fire shoot the artist traded dialogue with a BBC crew for a piece the documentary makers would entitle Getting to Dylan.12 It was a clever title. He had acted out the role of the unapproachable star and made it devilishly hard for his interrogators to get anywhere near him for weeks, finally dragging them all the way to Toronto, where parts of his movie were being shot. They retaliated slyly with the suggestion that some of the things getting to the artist were not necessarily doing him a world of good. At times Dylan seemed to have a bad cold, for example, a condition that came and went unpredictably. At other moments the idea that anyone could get through to him on any real human level, person to person, straight question and straight answer, was mocked by his affectless demeanour while he sat fidgeting in his movie-star trailer. Just as in the mid-’60s, Dylan’s entire effort went into remaining resolutely unforthcoming, but on this occasion his idea of postmodern mockery was to sketch his interviewer, fail to take enquiries about his work seriously, and affect no interest in anything, in general or in particular. The impression given was that it was no affectation.
The first of two encounters for the documentary team had barely begun before Dylan was laying down his perverse rules. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you know, I’m not gonna say anything that you’re gonna get any revelations about … It’s not gonna happen.’ His songwriting? ‘I just write ’em.’ Politics? Yet again, Dylan c
laimed to be baffled by the very meaning of the word. His public? ‘Nobody knows me and I don’t know them.’ By the end, he was resorting to old press-conference tricks from a previous life. ‘Well, gimme an answer,’ he demanded at one point, ‘and I’ll say it.’
Once upon a time, that kind of thing had seemed like a street-smart tease in the face of fatuous enquiries. This time around Dylan looked and sounded as though he truly had no answers, as though jadedness had become pathological. Worse, he behaved as if he was perfectly, coldly content with his condition. At no point did he attempt to explain why this poor, put-upon star, this legend (and so forth) reduced to playing in a second-rate melodrama because his albums no longer sold, was bothering to talk to anyone at all. The fires had been doused.
In February 1987, Dylan turned up in Los Angeles at a Taj Mahal concert, then at a Warren Zevon session where there was a need for a harmonica player. In March, he sang a George Gershwin song, ‘Soon’, at a Brooklyn Academy of Music affair to mark the half-century that had passed since the composer’s death. Dylan was by then four years older than Gershwin had been at his passing. The paradigmatic Jewish musical genius had composed Rhapsody in Blue when he was only 26, An American in Paris before he was 30 and Porgy and Bess when he was just 37. Dylan was not the only dazzling meteor ever sighted in the American firmament. In his short life, Gershwin had not wasted a day and had never succumbed to self-indulgence, to self-pity, or to lethargy. Dylan’s creative inertness had become his public image.