by Bell, Ian
The only important mystery attached to the recording sessions for the work Dylan would call Down in the Groove is why he bothered. It was an album made to fail, predestined, if that’s the word, to have not a prayer. The artist could only have justified this exercise if his intention had been to inform the world that his talent was extinguished. At least 30 musicians were called to the scene of the crime, but not one among them could crack the case. The likes of Mark Knopfler and Sly and Robbie, who knew something about the artist and his methods, could not provide him with a clue. Superstar peers such as Eric Clapton and Jerry Garcia could not revive the corpse. Paul Simonon and Steven Jones, those jobbing punk survivors of The Clash and the Pistols, could shed no light on the mystery. Unlike Knocked Out Loaded, the nadir before the nadir, there would not even be that one song to treasure, that single sliver of hope, in the wreckage named Down in the Groove.
Even Columbia paused over this one. In fact, the company paused for an entire year. Efforts to record the album began in March and ended in June, but the 32 minutes retrieved from the debacle would not see the light until the end of May 1988. Dylan would juggle with what he had during that long hiatus, altering the running order, inserting a couple of previously discarded failures of his own as though throwing damp twigs onto dying embers. It made no important difference. The album would reach number 61 on the American album chart and only get so high because, miraculously, there were still handfuls of customers refusing to believe that Dylan was incapable, finally, of repaying their faith.
It is almost redundant to discuss Down in the Groove, like recycling waste paper for a thesis on waste paper. Of ten tracks, only two were the artist’s own work. One was ‘Death Is Not the End’, the song that buyers of Infidels had been spared for the sound reason that the writer had insulted the memory of his talent before getting around to insulting the audience. It begins:
When you’re sad and when you’re lonely
And you haven’t got a friend
Just remember that death is not the end
The other original piece offered by the world’s greatest songwriter was ‘Had a Dream About You, Baby’, one of the works he had struggled to contrive for Hearts of Fire. It no more needs to be quoted here than it needed to be recorded. Remarkably, however, neither song is quite as bad as the pair Dylan devised with Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead when he was trying to mend the mesh in his shredded net. The artist would come to have a bizarre attachment to the piece called ‘Silvio’, even sanctioning its release as a single in 1988. It seems he liked it. An alternative view is that the track is objectively hateful and infallibly, almost supernaturally irritating. It is redeemed somewhat only by the fact that its companion piece is worse. Officially, Dylan was to blame for just the music, but he was entirely responsible for performing a song called ‘Ugliest Girl in the World’ and putting it on an album. The full measure of what Down in the Groove signified is that he could come up with nothing, nothing at all, better than this piece of stupefying nonsense.
The album’s cover versions are blameless by comparison. The fact that Dylan discarded a couple of those while tinkering with the sequencing has even allowed a few of his blindly loyal fans to misapply the weasel’s favourite word to the entire farrago. Down in the Groove is, apparently, ‘underrated’, a misunderstood and overlooked ‘classic’. One answer to that claim would be this: underrated only by anyone who has heard several hundred other Bob Dylan recordings. The album’s single saving grace is a good performance of the traditional ‘Shenandoah’. There was a clue in that fact, had Dylan been paying attention.
*
His legal contest with the hovering ghost of Albert Grossman, that other reminder of past glories, was dragging towards its end while the flotsam of Down in the Groove was being lashed together. The Bear himself had died of a heart attack on a Concorde flight to London in January 1986, but his widow, Sally, had elected to carry on the fight on behalf of the Grossman estate. In May 1987, Dylan sanctioned an out-of-court settlement that cost him a couple of million dollars but got him what he truly wanted, the publishing rights to his own work. In essence, the deal was a recognition of the familiar distinction between justice and law. Albert’s moral right to own any part of those songs had been as questionable as the percentages he had extracted at every turn from his young client’s earnings. On the other hand, as the settlement in effect recognised, the contracts had been sound enough in law. Grossman had been ruthless, but not stupid. Dylan, trapped all those years later in an era when he was barely able to string a verse together, had won full ownership of the art he had made when songs had flowed from him like prophecies from an entranced oracle. That must have made for a strange moment in the spring of 1987.
His next move was stranger still. Fans of the Grateful Dead were, as they remain, almost as fixedly dedicated as fans of Bob Dylan. Among devotees, for whom the name Deadheads has long seemed apt both as a description and a definition, the band possessed a significance – arrived at through a lot of drugs, a lot more hippie twaddle and a seemingly infinite tolerance for the zero-sum pastime called jamming – beyond any music they happened to play. On a good day, that was pedestrian, sometimes achieving the heights of tiresome. On a bad day, what with the drugs, the Dead were inept, relentlessly so. They talked a good song, however, and there is no denying their inexplicable popularity. Some of those stoned Deadheads spent their lives travelling from show to show.
Like everyone else for whom credibility mattered, the band were big Bob Dylan fans. The artist meanwhile counted the band’s guitar player, Jerry Garcia, as a friend. He also had a respect, for reasons best known to himself, for the lyrics of Robert Hunter. None of these facts counted as a sound enough basis for a collaboration. Nor was the money, even the very large amount of money, that Dylan accepted for agreeing to six shows with the Dead collective in the biggest stadiums available in July much of an excuse. We can only presume that he wanted cash quickly to pay off the widow Grossman. That kind of motive is not often worth confusing with artistic inspiration.
There are, as usual, bootleg recordings of the tour rehearsals staged at a place called Club Front in San Rafael, California, in June. Copies of these are often extensive, not to say endless – in such matters, the word ‘complete’ on packaging counts as fair warning – but they have the merit of showing Dylan being nudged into attempting songs he had long ignored. Left to his own devices, he would probably not have considered John Wesley Harding songs such as ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ or ‘The Wicked Messenger’. Equally, for whatever reason, he had never paid attention to the likes of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ or ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile’. At San Rafael he was even talked into essaying ‘Joey’, the disputable Desire song he had written with Jacques Levy. That was the good news, all of the good news. From the desultory bootleg recordings can be heard the approaching sounds of a disaster in the making.
In this period the artist had at least one vice in common with his new colleagues. They had always been relaxed in their attitude towards what was good enough for the public, apparently believing that if they were entranced by their ramshackle efforts the customers would feel the same way. A faith that, some of the time at least, things would somehow ‘come together’ on stage was part of the price audiences were expected to pay. By 1987, Dylan had acquired the same view. Add the fact that the Grateful Dead loved his songs but seemed utterly incapable of understanding how the artist achieved a performance, in his better moments, and the script for a real farce was written. Deadheads were numerous; big crowds could be guaranteed. But the alliance was so inherently foolish, its basis so fragile, a humiliation for Dylan was certain.
So it proved. On the inevitable concert bootlegs the following can be heard: one famous songwriter struggling to find the melodic line, never mind the heart, of song after song; one cult band operating below even their modest best; and two acts occupying the same stage who each seem, often enough, to be unaware of the presence o
f the other. A decent live album might yet have been salvaged. Six big shows would surely have yielded seven tracks fit to be released. In one set of post hoc excuses that claim would be made and Dylan would get the blame for dumping some of the least-bad recordings. The truth is that nothing in the material discarded would have improved the album entitled Dylan & the Dead when it was released finally in February 1989. The critical consensus then would be uncomplicated: if this was the best, God help the rest. Should you ever wish, with malign intent, to deter a prospective young fan from taking an interest in Bob Dylan, play him or her a couple of the San Rafael bootleg tracks, then this dead-and-barely-alive set.
*
Years later, Dylan would say that 1987 was almost the end of him as a performer. He might have been trying to fool the public, but he was not fooling himself. In 2001, John Farley of Time magazine would be told: ‘At that point, I was just going to get out of it and everything that entails.’ Steve Inskeep of National Public Radio would hear in 2004 of how ‘I really didn’t feel like my heart was in it much any more.’13 Perhaps so, but Dylan still crossed the Atlantic to spend September and half of October on tour once again with Tom Petty and his band. During an interview with Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder in Jerusalem on the eve of the second concert the artist was observed to be drinking with relentless, practised ease. On stage that night he looked haggard and uncertain in his movements. The concerts were not well received in Israel, though they would improve as the artist dragged himself across Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, back to Italy and Switzerland, then to France and Belgium, and finally to England. But even the improvements would not be to every taste.
Bob Dylan could still justify three nights in Birmingham and four nights at the Wembley Arena. Whether he could still justify himself, or do justice to songs he no longer understood, was another story, a tale growing darker as age and time pressed in upon him. As he would confess in due course in his 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One, the songs had become ‘strangers’ to him. Why, in truth, did people continue to turn out for concerts by this performer? Just for a glimpse of what still passed for a legend? And was that enough, in turn, for him?
He had called the tour Temples in Flames, as though passing his own judgement on desecrated monuments. In Locarno in Switzerland on 5 October, while concealing himself among the backing vocalists, he had experienced what he would remember as a strange, daunting moment of self-awareness. Years later, one who was present at one of the Wembley shows would describe Dylan’s performance as ‘an inspired vandalisation, brutal and challenging, a scorched earth triumph, charred and astonishing’, but admit that many other fans were appalled or infuriated by what had been done to the songs.14 In The Observer, the BBC disc jockey John Peel would write: ‘Being an enigma at 20 is fun, being an enigma at 30 shows a lack of imagination, and being an enigma at Dylan’s age is just plain daft … From the moment the living legend took to the stage, it was evident that here was business he wanted accomplished with the minimum of effort.’15
He was pulling the temple down around his ears. It might have counted as creative destruction, as an artist’s defiant gesture, but sometimes explanations are no better than rationalisations. In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would explain that after the European concerts he had planned a touring schedule with the deliberate intention of alienating his older fans. Somehow they were to be replaced with a younger crowd on the grounds – you can only admire the gall of this rationalising writer – that his traditional audience was no longer up to the task of appreciating his shows. If that was the plan, it would be postponed. As the book tells it, Dylan sustained a ‘freak’ injury that left his hand gashed. The wound is described as serious and painful, injurious to his body and his hopes, but the dates and details are vague.
Early in 1988, Dylan would distract himself for a while as a member of the Traveling Wilburys, a kind of musical club for superstar hobbyists of a certain vintage, as though to prove there was nothing more pressing on his mind than messing around with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Petty and Jeff Lynne. The gang would give themselves silly names – Dylan would be ‘Lucky’, supposedly – and manage to come up with an album full of inoffensive music that would fare far better than any of the artist’s recent works. Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 would in fact sell many more copies than any album Dylan had ever made. His chief contribution would be a fairly sharp song, its lyrics a parody of Bruce Springsteen, complete with the appropriate allusions, entitled ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.
It was out on Thunder Road, Tweeter at the wheel
They crashed into paradise, they could hear them tires squeal
The undercover cop pulled up and said everyone of you’s a liar
If you don’t surrender now it’s gonna go down to the wire
The song was adequate, if that was your taste, though clearly the writer did not take it seriously. Why would he? In January 1988 he had been ‘inducted’ into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at a big ceremony in New York. Springsteen had given a passionate speech in tribute that had sounded only a little like a requiem. For all his rhetoric and for all his affected disdain, the artist accepted the world’s baubles readily enough. He seemed not to notice that such honours sometimes come at the end of a career.
These things filled up his time. In essence, it was all little better than displacement activity. Dylan’s real problem was that he was going through these motions because he did not know what else to do.
CHAPTER TEN
Born in Time
NOTHING MUCH WAS EXPECTED OF INTERSTATE 88, THE TOUR inaugurated on 7 June 1988 out in the golden west. To begin with, it seemed that nothing much would be delivered. The Pavilion amphitheatre in the city of Concord, in San Francisco’s suburban East Bay, though designed by Frank Gehry and prestigious enough, was just another oversized open-air entertainment space. Given the choices available to him, it was not the most appropriate or intriguing venue Dylan could have picked to commence a run of 71 concerts in the United States and Canada that summer. For one thing, the appeal of his name alone could no longer fill the wide and open expanses of a place like the Pavilion.
What was the average casual fan entitled to expect, in any case? In Europe in 1987 Dylan had too often crashed and burned amid those pseudo-mythic temples in flames. Any Californian observer who had read reports of the four shows at London’s Wembley Arena would have noted only insinuating tales of an artist in bad shape and, as most reviews insisted, wretched voice. Once again, the omens were poor. None of the 6,000 or so people who saw Dylan return to work after his vacation with the Traveling Wilburys – at a venue capable of containing 12,500 – could have expected something historic. Quite how historic remains a matter of dispute, not least if the artist is offering an opinion. In his version, nothing particularly unusual happened at the Pavilion, or in its long aftermath, not at his behest. He had pulled himself together, that was all.
Second on the bill that evening were The Alarm, a briefly popular, well-meaning Welsh band who might just have been mistaken for The Clash on a bad day if there was plenty of static on the radio and you weren’t listening too hard. Who knows who chose them, big hair and big pretensions, for the tour? The Alarm were better suited to providing the introductory bombast for U2, as they had done in 1983, but such was the price Dylan fans had to pay for the stadium-rock experience. If nothing else – and truly there was precious little else – the support act provided a handy illustration of the nature of the decade in which the artist had been cast adrift.
Given all that had gone before, these were not popular music’s finest hours. Another of heavy metal’s Monsters of Rock tours was soaking up the middle-American youth dollar when Dylan took the stage at Concord. Michael Jackson was, it seemed, everywhere that year. George Michael had commenced his campaign for hearts, minds and sundries that very week with the single ‘I Want Your Sex’, an introduction to what would become the year’s most successful album. If the aim was to fill
stadiums, the high-end competition was Guns N’ Roses. As ever, the charts tell their story.
Dylan might have been the agent of his own artistic decline in the trough of this low, dishonest decade. He might have made some very foolish moves. But how, in truth, was he supposed to react in such an environment? By courting slow, sure artistic death as a nostalgia act? By accepting that his moment in the spotlight was long gone? It amounted to a further series of questions. Did he still know what he wanted? Did he still care? Did he still know how to achieve what he wanted? For most listeners, Down in the Groove, released just a week before the Concord show, was providing dispiriting answers.
*
Almost a decade later, in September of 1997, Dylan would sit down with David Gates of Newsweek in a hotel room in Santa Monica, California, for an interview designed to publicise the album Time Out of Mind. In the course of the conversation the singer would make a couple of statements that were frank by most standards, far less by the infinitely pliant standards of the entertainment business.
Those who had judged him finished and done by 1987 had not been far off the mark. ‘I’d kind of reached the end of the line,’ Dylan would tell Gates. ‘Whatever I had started out to do, it wasn’t that. I was going to pack it in.’
As he told the tale, the performer had been left with very little choice. Decadence, carelessness, bad habits and cynicism have been adduced often enough by critics, friendly or hostile, to explain Dylan during this late ’80s period. In his own recollection, something more profound was going on. The inability to write much of anything, easily or often, was by then well established. But as Dylan told Gates, he had lost even the ability to perform his songs. A decade on, he mimicked and relived his dread: ‘I can’t remember what it means, does it mean – is it just a bunch of words? Maybe it’s like what all these people say, just a bunch of surrealistic nonsense.’