Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  Touring is part of playing. Anybody can sit in the studio and make records, but that’s unrealistic and they can’t possibly be a meaningful performer. You have to do it night after night to understand what it’s all about.

  Almost a decade later, in September of 1997, as the tours rolled on endlessly, he was sticking to his theme, explaining to the New York Times that ‘A lot of people don’t like the road, but it’s as natural to me as breathing’.

  I do it because I’m driven to do it, and I either hate it or love it. I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be. You can’t be who you want to be in daily life. I don’t care who you are, you’re going to be disappointed in daily life. But the cure-all for all that is to get on the stage, and that’s why performers do it. But in saying that, I don’t want to put on the mask of celebrity. I’d rather just do my work and see it as a trade.8

  Such claims were plausible, for a while, but they failed to answer every question. Was the occasional reworking of old material a true substitute for creativity, for a lost songwriting gift? If his records didn’t sell, what size of an audience was he entitled to expect? In the notes for World Gone Wrong Dylan would write of ‘learning to go forward by turning back the clock’. It would be a necessary step, perhaps. The album and its predecessor, 1992’s Good As I Been to You, would represent a reimmersion in the original sources of his music. In some sense, Dylan would repeat the course of study he had undertaken back in Greenwich Village, in his early days. But how could the wandering life of a touring performer allow him to ‘go forward’ if it involved nothing more than the endless reshuffling of his back pages? That didn’t seem feasible. After all, World Gone Wrong would appear almost at the mid-point of a seven-year creative intermission in which Dylan released not a single new, self-written song. His habit of performing ancient folk and blues tunes during his concerts no doubt had a salutary effect, but it did not count as any kind of substitute for original work.

  Still, for a star down on his luck in 1988 a small band was relatively cheap to run and easy, if the only issue was music, to lead. Freeing himself from the paraphernalia of previous years also forced Dylan once again to pay real heed to the songs he was performing. Sacking the backing vocalists (wife included) forced everyone’s attention, not least his own, back to the person whose name was on the tickets, big and bold. It also helped that the artist had reached the point at which, ironically enough, his choices carried few risks. Since his critical stock was on the floor when he took to the stage in Concord on 7 June, Dylan was in one sense liberated. Nothing was expected of him. It therefore didn’t much matter what he did.

  The beginnings of a like process, the first glimmerings, might have been at work in the part of his brain where songs began. They would be slow to emerge, but after the crushing failures of his recent albums there was, perversely, nothing to inhibit them. The intense pressure always to perform as a writer had been all but guaranteed to leave Dylan making elaborate excuses for failure when potency deserted him. But after Down in the Groove, how much worse could things become? Defeat was, weirdly, an opportunity. He had been written off so thoroughly it hardly mattered what he wrote. Finally he had been freed of that crushing ‘legend’, the great and forever matchless Bob Dylan. There was something to be said for burning bridges.

  The artist certainly understood the logic. He had applied it himself to excuse the Self Portrait album when that odd, disconcerting work was derided after its release in 1970. In one of the stories he had told back then, the project was presented as a deliberately self-destructive act. It had been intended, supposedly, to free him from the burden of expectations. An entire double album sacrificed just to correct a few misperceptions? You don’t have to believe the tale to grasp that, by the middle of 1988, fate and a bunch of shoddy releases had indeed left Dylan with next to nothing by way of reputation and with nothing left to lose. It was entirely logical for a voice in his head to say, ‘What the hell.’

  The contrary version can be found in Chronicles: Volume One.9 By his own account, Dylan had stopped even thinking of himself as a writer of songs. By 1988, supposedly, he had no desire to pursue the art. He had written enough and had nothing more to prove. In his recollection, he had reached the point at which he no longer expected to write another song. Somehow, nevertheless, he did just that. Typically, Dylan’s book fails to explain just what changed or why the change took place. By the beginning of March 1989 this artist, the one who had been planning his retirement, would have enough material for another album, with plenty to spare. And plenty to waste.

  You could just as well believe, of course, that once again bits of song simply began to come to him, as so often before, as if from out of the air. He had no other explanation for his creativity. By and large, he did not attempt to tamper with the mystery, to force himself or force the process. Nevertheless, after he and his three-piece band had rolled across the republic between June and October in 1988 to end up with a final triumph on their hands during a four-night stand at Radio City Music Hall in New York – causing a regiment of critics to perform a smart if inelegant about-face – he might just have begun to dare to dream again. Clearly, he had begun to scribble.

  In Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan would describe writing perhaps 20 songs while he recovered from his hand injury. He would say they had come very easily in the end, but he would not bother to explain the reasons for this sudden upsurge from what had seemed a long-dry well. Chronicles is elusive by design. The sole piece of dating evidence given in the text is a reference to the presidential election of 1988 as a possible background to a song called ‘Political World’. That scarcely narrows the range of possibilities. The last Dylan concert of the year took place on 19 October; the nation chose George H.W. Bush in preference to Michael Dukakis on 8 November. In other words, the artist started writing when the year was almost at an end. Though he regarded the first song that came to him as a kind of reawakening, like the first sign of a dreaming patient emerging from deep sedation, the author was not exactly punctilious in documenting such matters.

  Equally, it is not known when Dylan decided that the bruises inflicted after Down in the Groove had healed sufficiently for him to risk a return to the studio. It is not known, though it involves a decent guess, if all the praise he had won for the tour known as Interstate 88 restored his confidence after so many dismal years. A lot isn’t known. For facts, we can mention the release of Dylan & the Dead in February 1989, an event that rendered any thought of an album drawn from his more recent concert work impossible, more’s the pity. We can remember, too, that it wasn’t remotely feasible for this recording artist just to stop recording. In order to tour he needed product, preferably product of some small merit, to keep himself in the public eye. He also had an obligation, as ever, to Columbia. Despite all the later talk of a planned retirement, Dylan had accepted a new contract from the company just as it was being taken over by the Japanese conglomerate Sony. Thanks presumably to fans of his collaborators, Dylan & the Dead would not fail as catastrophically as Real Live, but it would get no higher than 37 on the American chart. Like it or not, a degree of commercial pressure remained a fact of life for anyone, legendary or not, who hoped to sell concert tickets. Finally, there is the fact that over dinner one night the U2 singer Bono had recommended the producer Daniel Lanois to Dylan.

  He had watched this 37-year-old Canadian at work in New Orleans with the soul-singing Neville Brothers when the tour reached the city towards the end of September. Dylan had liked what he heard. It seems he had also enjoyed the kind of ambience Lanois tried to create when he was recording. It was not quite the Woodstock basement, but it was based on the semi-subversive idea that technology should come to the artist, not the other way around. In essence, Lanois championed a sophisticated version of the kind of mobile recording set-up that Dylan had tried and failed to provide for himself while making Street-Legal at Run
down in Santa Monica. The mock-domestic setting the producer offered in New Orleans with his ‘Studio on the Move’ was vastly preferable to the usual music-industry padded cells that had given the artist the horrors for years. Perhaps this time Dylan could make an album that actually sounded the way he wanted it to sound. If, that is, he knew what he wanted.

  In Dylan’s eyes, Lanois also had the advantage of being a musician, not unsuccessful, in his own right. Furthermore, the Quebecker was an advocate of ‘atmosphere’, of the inherent worth of a great performance over anyone’s arbitrary notion of technical perfection. He detested the practice of separating the control console from the musicians. He liked ‘organic’ sound, ambient reverb and big, natural drum noises. Lanois would call the sound he created for Oh Mercy ‘swampy’. If it meant anything, the word would recognise the fact that there was no point in trying to turn a Bob Dylan album into an audiophile’s dream. That was no reason, equally, to allow it to sound, as certain of the artist’s albums had sounded, like a cheap radio heard through a mattress. Lanois took a great many pains to make his recordings sound ‘natural’.

  Dylan would tell the story of the making of Oh Mercy in Chronicles: Volume One. It would be a puzzling narrative, one that would not accord in every last particular with other accounts. It would describe the artist’s state of mind scrupulously, however. Here was a man who hesitated to begin work when he arrived in New Orleans, keeping Lanois and everyone else waiting. Here, too, was a Dylan who had a notebook full of songs, just for a change, but no real opinion, none he could articulate, about how they should sound, or any clear thoughts about the kind of album he wanted to make. As it transpired, he liked the idea of working with Lanois in New Orleans better than he liked the reality. A process that should have gone smoothly became, in Dylan’s later telling, a slow, difficult and fraught business. He wanted to believe he had left the aggravations of album-making behind, but before long his relations with Lanois grew tense as the two failed to agree over issues large and small. A friendship survived, but it was tested severely. Such circumstances were never conducive to clear-headed decision-making on Dylan’s part.

  During the first couple of weeks of recording he was as difficult as only he could be, rejecting every last thing attempted by the producer and his trusted local musicians. Dylan sat around strumming his guitar while Lanois struggled, temper fraying, to get any sort of useful contribution out of him. To those present, it wasn’t clear why or if this artist even wanted to make an album. As Mark Howard, the engineer, would remember, ‘there came this one point when Dan [Lanois] finally had a freak-out. He just wanted Dylan to smarten up. It became … not a yelling match, but uncomfortable.’ The artist nevertheless imposed his will in ways that could seem arbitrary, selfish, or designed just to show who was in charge. Dylan was a veteran of studio power struggles, though why he should have set out from the start to make life impossible for the producer he had chosen, a lauded professional who had accepted the job having heard only fragments of a few songs, is inexplicable. The legend’s aim seemed to be, in any case, to inflict as much inconvenience as he could on those around him, as though to test their obedience. Lanois, more than a little star-struck, was ready to put up with almost anything for the sake of a Dylan album. ‘Bob had a rule,’ he would recall. ‘We only recorded at night. I think he’s right about that: the body is ready to accommodate a certain tempo at night-time. I think it’s something to do with the pushing and pulling of the moon. At night-time we’re ready to be more mysterious and dark. Oh Mercy’s about that.’10

  So it began, yet again, the making of an album that should have been great. As with Infidels, the artist embarked on the production of a body of work that these days can only be appreciated if you take account of the songs Dylan chose – wilfully, perversely – to leave aside from the album he would release for sale. Oh Mercy would still turn out to be a very good set. It would return Dylan to that state of grace called critical favour, at least for a time. But once again it would leave anyone who cared about his art to put together a home-assembly kit from bootlegs and Bootleg Series releases. It remains the only way to get a clear idea of what was achieved in March and April 1989. Either Dylan was still refusing to put everything he had into a single album, or his understanding of what he was doing was a secret he didn’t care to reveal. In either event, he would seem like an artist with a peculiar ambivalence towards his work. For him, it seemed, even the best of his songs remained disposable and replaceable. That attitude relied on the conviction that there were plenty more where those came from. The songwriter who had barely survived a long spell on short rations would behave, in short, as though a brief season of plenty could never end.

  Dylan has never been straightforward about his understanding of his gifts, perhaps because his relationship with them is complicated, perhaps because the relationship has changed over the years. He takes an expert interest in the craft of songwriting, as you might expect, yet in Chronicles can be found describing himself as utterly bereft of interest in writing before, all of a sudden, he began to write the Oh Mercy songs. He has often denied being a disciplined writer, the kind who clocks in dutifully at a desk each day. In some of his descriptions of his art he truly does jot down notes that could as easily come to nothing as form the makings of a song. Equally, in some phases of his career – before recording Highway 61 Revisited or prior to Blood on the Tracks – he has indeed sat down and done his best to fill a notebook. At other times he has embarked on albums with little better than a handful of scraps at his disposal.

  The fragments of songs Lanois heard before the recording sessions that became Oh Mercy were accompanied by plaintive-sounding questions from the writer. Did the producer think this or that bit of verse and basic piano melody could make a song? Clearly, Dylan didn’t know. You are inclined to believe him, then, when he denies having much understanding of his own talent. Sometimes songs just come. He accepts or refuses the power of an idea according to his mood. That kind of claim makes his gift sound like a fragile thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The inference remains, therefore, that if Dylan can’t tell whether a fragment has the makings of a song he is liable to be a poor judge of the finished product.

  The largest crime he committed during the making of Oh Mercy was the omission of a song entitled ‘Series of Dreams’, closely followed by the decision to drop another work called ‘Dignity’. A third piece, ‘Born in Time’, would turn up on a subsequent Dylan album, but in a rendering that would sound undistinguished when set beside the track discarded from Oh Mercy. When the magnificent Tell Tale Signs, volume eight in the Bootleg Series, appeared in October 2008 with its outtakes and ‘previously unreleased’ tracks, anyone with an interest in Dylan could just about piece together the work that might have been. It would cost the fan the price of two albums, the second running to three discs if you felt extravagant, for the privilege. In effect, though Oh Mercy still contained songs of rare quality, songs such as ‘Most of the Time’, ‘What Was it You Wanted’ and ‘Ring Them Bells’, it had been deprived of 30 per cent of its power.

  The grievous loss was ‘Series of Dreams’, a song unlike any that Dylan had produced before, one that proved he was no extinct creative volcano and vindicated the Lanois method. By the artist’s standards the skeletal lyrics were nothing special, yet the song truly did manage to capture the haunting power of a dream. Furthermore, it was a vivid illustration of a theme that had long underpinned Dylan’s work and thought, less a question of ‘What’s truly real?’ than an enquiry into our ability ever to experience reality as anything more than a succession of overlapping dreams. On one reading, the speaker in the song could simply be describing what seemed to go on in his head while he slept. In one dream

  … numbers were burning

  In another, I witnessed a crime

  In one, I was running, and in another

  All I seemed to be doing was climb

  Yet these dreams, twisted one within the other, migh
t also be happening in a dream-like reality. Lanois has drums that pound like an insistent question as the singer in the first verse describes himself thinking about his series of dreams, but then saying that the thinking itself, about nothing ‘specific’, also felt ‘Like a dream, when someone wakes up and screams’. In this human condition, as Dylan observes, there is ‘no exit in any direction’ and no way to break out: ‘the cards are no good that you’re holding / Unless they’re from another world.’

  So brilliant was the track, Dylan clearly had no choice – or so the jaundiced listener is left to conclude – but to leave it off the album. The best of the songs that survived his veto – and the best are very good – were enhanced by that ‘swampy’ Lanois production, a design for the album’s overall sound that seemed to manipulate light, shade and ambient temperature within the verses. Some still find the producer’s method too fussy, the results contrived and artificial, but it suited Dylan’s words. ‘What Was It You Wanted’ sounded sepulchral; the lovely ‘Shooting Star’ felt elegiac; ‘Most of the Time’ was in its essence nocturnal. So much could be taken for granted, you might think, as part of a producer’s job. Yet Lanois and his musicians complemented Dylan’s lyrics in their arrangements and playing with an assurance that no one else had achieved, the artist least of all in his attempts to manage his recording sessions, in a very long time.

  In parts, Oh Mercy would have a kind of Southern Gothic quality. The mysterious if melodramatic ‘Man in the Long Black Coat’, the tale of a Bible-quoting stranger with whom a woman disappears leaving no explanation or clue, showed that Dylan had not lost his interest in punishment and sin. ‘Most of the Time’, the stoical confessions of a man no better than ‘halfway content’, sounded like evidence that age had begun to take its toll on a writer approaching his 48th birthday. The title ‘What Good Am I?’ spoke for itself: one writer, at least, was not impressed by Bob Dylan. ‘What Was it You Wanted’, solemn as a walk in a graveyard, was the artist at his most icily dismissive, and his most commanding.