by Bell, Ian
What was it you wanted
I ain’t keeping score
Are you the same person
That was here before?
Yet still he lacked the crucial ability to make important decisions and get them right. Worse, indecision only made Dylan stubborn. With his unparalleled record of achievement, who was to tell him he was wrong? He was not, in any case, some gauche teen idol to be commanded by a producer; all the power was his. Lanois had been granted as much of a say as anyone Dylan had worked with since Jerry Wexler during the Slow Train Coming sessions, but when push came to shove only one person called the shots. By all accounts, Lanois argued hard for ‘Series of Dreams’. It was the one song above all others he hoped to protect from the artist’s reckless self-censorship. The producer was proud of his contribution to the track, in each of its several incarnations, and rightly so. He had understood instantly that Dylan was embarked on a new kind of writing. Lanois had sensed the possibilities and had struggled to bring them to fruition. As far as he was concerned, Oh Mercy could and should have been the start of something. In the end, Dylan was once more the chief obstacle to what could have been one of the finest of Bob Dylan albums. He still managed to emerge with an album that was pretty fair. Above all, it was no Down in the Groove.
Rolling Stone would decide that ‘Oh Mercy explores moral concerns and matters of the heart with a depth and seriousness Dylan has not demonstrated since Desire’.11 The habit of measuring the artist against a yardstick he himself had shaped was, as ever, near pointless, but it at least served to affirm the truth that there was some flame of creative life left in him. Oh Mercy would reach number 30 on the American chart, a showing that was both indifferent and far better than anything Down in the Groove had managed. British buyers meanwhile placed the new album at number six, a more reasonable verdict. If still another comeback was required, Oh Mercy was surely a start.
*
In May 1989, Dylan once again toured Europe. Afterwards, he set running the tale of the never-ending odyssey by playing on in America from July until September. That autumn he reorganised his management, giving the job of handling his concert bookings to one Jeff Kramer in Los Angeles and responsibility for his New York office to another Jeff named Rosen. Dylan also turned up, incongruously, at a telethon in LA for Chabad-Lubavitch, scaring up a whole new flock of ‘rumours’, which is to say guesses, about the nature of his religious beliefs. In the spring of 1990, meanwhile, he busied himself once again with the largely pointless if lucrative Traveling Wilburys project. Roy Orbison had died suddenly during the previous December. The ageing ad hoc celebrity boy band were deprived of a guiding spirit, but the survivors pressed on regardless. They were rewarded, if that’s the word, with a flaccid little album that would come nowhere near to matching the sales of its predecessor.
Amid all this, with plans being laid for a year of touring that would encompass 92 shows, the artist was attempting to make another album of his own. This time the fashionable Was brothers, David and Don, joined the list of music industry Dylan fans who thought they could master the job of producing his work. The brothers hired the likes of Al Kooper and the guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan as the core of a top-heavy if illustrious musical crew. George Harrison, Elton John, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby and other famous names put in appearances in the studio, but the added scattering of glitter did nothing to improve Under the Red Sky. After the album’s release in September, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice would decide to ‘rate’ the album more highly than Oh Mercy, apparently because the new set showed ‘post-punk’ tendencies, whatever those might be, but most attentive reviewers would be as dismissive as most record-buyers. Dylan’s downward slide would resume: 38 in America, number 13 in Britain. With one good leftover from Oh Mercy, a fine mock children’s song that gave the album its title and one terrific track inserted to compensate the diehards, Under the Red Sky would get what it deserved in the marketplace. Loyal buyers deserved some small recompense, in whatever shape or form, for a set that began with a thing called ‘Wiggle Wiggle’.
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle in your boots and shoes
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, you got nothing to lose
A piece of fun? Just a nonsense song for the sake of it? Those are comforting thoughts, no doubt. Instead, a track that has pole position in any contest to find the worst thing Dylan ever recorded sounds like a demonstration of his contempt for his industry, for his work and for the album-making process. To choose the ‘Wiggle’ horror as the album’s opening number smacked of something more than carelessness. With this, so it seemed, the artist was defying enemies and allies alike. Along with a second-best version of the marvellous ‘Born in Time’, the song called ‘Handy Dandy’ was the compensation, a piece in which Dylan described and adopted a fascinating, funny and devilish persona, part gangster, part Cotton Club bandleader, part demonic presence. It was, in essence, a recasting of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ with a few rough grains of the Kingsmen’s ‘Louie Louie’ from 1963 thrown in, but none the worse for that. Dylan at least sounded as if he was briefly happy in his work. For the rest, it was an ill-written album, one from which plenty of ‘analysis’ could be derived, but precious little real listening pleasure. For what it’s worth, Dylan himself has never had good things to say about Under the Red Sky.
He went back on the road as though going on the run. Performance now truly did seem to be the entire point of this artist’s existence. In January, after the first sessions for the album, he had made a dash for Brazil, France and England, finishing up with six long-remembered nights at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Once Under the Red Sky and the last Traveling Wilburys sessions were complete, he was gone again, to Canada and the northern United States. In midsummer he could be found at any European festival anyone cared to name. By August he was hitting the homeland once more and still touring – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – by the middle of November. The idea that Dylan was doing all of this to promote an album he disliked and the public disdained was laughable. Whatever the reality of the ‘Locarno epiphany’, that mythologised moment of truth, it was obvious that he could not or would not stop performing. Another trait was becoming plain. Some shows could be incandescently brilliant, others utterly risible. Those who bought tickets for a Dylan concert were given no guarantee as to the version of the artist liable to turn up.
So much was becoming common knowledge within his industry. What was not yet known was the significance of Under the Red Sky, an album that would remain ‘underrated’ for very good reasons. Of itself, that needn’t have mattered. Dylan’s lyrical gift had ebbed since Oh Mercy, but he had still managed to come up with ten original songs for the Red Sky project. He had made poor albums often enough before, in any case, and hauled himself out of the pit. There was nothing to say he wouldn’t recover again. His riposte to those who had gathered for his wake after Down in the Groove had been robust enough, after all. The several failures of Under the Red Sky would surely be forgotten in time. What no one knew was that those were to be the last songs, good or bad, that Dylan would write and record in seven years.
*
It was as though he went underground. No one still hoped to hear this artist voice any sort of comment on the nation’s affairs, or ever again reset the compass for popular music, but the absence of his songs would become almost disorienting for those who had followed his career. The lacuna would have no precedent. Dylan had endured a savage writer’s block before and survived. He had suffered ‘amnesia’ like an actual neurological wound. In the early 1970s he had struggled long and hard to find creative alternatives to the miraculous, unforced spontaneity of the ’60s. But even the hiatus between New Morning’s release in October 1970 and the Planet Waves ‘comeback’ of January ’74 had not been wholly barren. There had not been much writing to underpin the Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid soundtrack in July 1973, but ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ had still counted as a lot better than nothing. What began after Under the Red Sky
was a crisis of a different order, one that seemed only to deepen when Dylan talked amiably, expertly, about the art of songwriting to Paul Zollo of SongTalk magazine in April 1991, or when he claimed to a journalist in April 1994 to have ‘a bunch of papers and notes and things lying around. Only time is going to tell when those things come out.’12 Year after year, nothing would ‘come out’. If a couple of sparse albums of old folk and blues tunes were meanwhile to be Dylan’s oblique judgement on modern times, the statement made would prove hard to decipher. Beyond those enigmatic offerings he would fall silent as a recording artist, as though one part of him had ceased to exist.
Instead, he would be out there somewhere, ceaselessly in motion, entirely public and utterly inscrutable, somehow barely visible under all the blazing stage lights. You could catch him if his tour came to your town – and there was always a good chance of that – but save for an outbreak of strangeness, a performance of the Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’ or Otis Redding’s ‘Dock of the Bay’, it would become hard to describe what he was doing or why. Witnesses at some of his shows would begin to claim that he wasn’t necessarily sober during every performance. One city would report that the concert was dire, another that their Dylan had been magnificent. In part, the tale of the never-ending tour would be born of the self-evident fact that for fans there would be nothing else to go on during seven lean years. An entire aesthetic would be devised, one that persists to this day, to justify the claim that Dylan’s creativity survived and thrived in the stark, undeniable absence of new songs.
The America he traversed in the early 1990s had decided to remain conservative. The Iran-Contra scandal, the fascinating tale of the Reagan White House flogging missiles to Iranian hostage-takers in order to fund murderous Nicaraguan insurgents, had not harmed the Republican cause in the slightest during the 1988 election. Barely half the electorate had bothered to vote, but George H.W. Bush had still put the Democrats and his opponent, Michael Dukakis, to disorderly flight. By 1990, some 15 per cent of Americans were still failing to graduate from high school, yet that was exactly the percentage of their fellow citizens who had been smitten by ‘home computing’. An alliterative mouthful, the World Wide Web, was about to go public while conservative commentators fretted over porn, public morality and the subversive habit they called political correctness. Inspired by Robert Bly’s book Iron John a few stout men were off in the woods hunting for masculinity while a few others were being handcuffed for crimes committed in the Wall Street undergrowth. In Iraq, a place that could be found on most maps, a former American ally named Saddam Hussein would spend the summer of 1990 preparing to invade a kingdom built on oilfields called Kuwait. The United States had not been in a real war for a while.
In 1990 and 1991, nevertheless, a Bob Dylan fan was plotting to remove Bush from the Oval Office. The connection between Bill Clinton’s New Democrats and the old New Left as the artist once had known it was remote, by no accident, but a lot of things had changed. The breaching of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had seen the Soviet regime begin to unravel like a threadbare banner. On the day after Christmas in 1991 the USSR would be gone, formally and for good. Republicans would claim most of the credit on Reagan’s behalf, and even allow a little of it to Bush, but at first they would fail to notice that much of their self-declared purpose and a lot of their rabble-rousing opportunities had disappeared with the Russian reds. A short war over Kuwait had done Bush’s opinion-poll ratings a power of good in the early part of 1991, but suddenly the ground was shifting, all but unnoticed, under Republican feet. If there was no longer a need to fear the nuclear war that had sometimes seemed inevitable when Reagan was in charge, what need was there for a war party addicted to defence spending? Political territory that had seemed secure for conservatives was put at risk while the evil empire folded and the economy struggled. A Democrat who represented youth, change, hope and other non-specific virtues while tending to the concerns of middle America might be in with a shout: such was Clinton’s insight, even if his own party needed a lot of convincing.
This candidate was certainly young enough. Dylan’s junior by five years, Clinton was the first presidential contender in the artist’s career who did not regard him as the perplexing voice of a coming generation. In 1991, Dylan would be 50, no one’s idea of the voice of youth, rebellious or otherwise. Yet what was Clinton if not proudly, even aggressively youthful, though ‘moderate’ in all things (save his sexual behaviour)? He could command a stage and inspire a crowd as well as any famous singer. Clinton was, after all, a performer first and last. He had a genius for it. He also knew what he was talking about, down to the last abstruse detail, but he could speak as though talking personally to each and every member of an audience. The candidate had charisma, ‘voice of a generation’ charisma.
Against this master politician planted firmly on the centre ground a new strain of conservatism was beginning to organise even as Bush luxuriated in his poll ratings after the first Gulf war. Right-wingers of this variety hated Clinton’s guts. They hated him most of all simply because he was brilliant. Their loathing became frantic when it became obvious in the summer of 1992 that this Democrat was dangerous, that he could win and go on winning. Conservatives turned on Bush, the traitor in the Oval Office with his effete talk of common ground, but their real impulse was a fear of losing power. The ’80s had been a good time to be rich and right wing. That was – wasn’t it? – the American way of life, to be defended at all costs. Clinton was no more left wing than he was celibate, of course, but that didn’t matter. There was the risk that he would preside over the return of ungodly liberalism if his party gained control of the government. While Dylan turned the corner into middle age, old battle lines were being redrawn. A fact was rapidly becoming a cliché. Amid Clinton’s victories in the 1990s the country would divide evenly and, it seemed, beyond hope of reconciliation into the so-called 50–50 nation. Where would an artist stand in that kind of American landscape? Dylan the songwriter would be silent for years on end, as though lost in a fog, but reality would find him in the end. The present, as he would realise, begins in the past.
*
Those who track the artist’s activities have a job on their hands when they list, tabulate, annotate, adumbrate and otherwise pore over the first half of the ’90s. Unless you have the philosophical serenity of a data-entry clerk, it must be tedious work. Tour after tour after tour, musician following musician, one-night stand following one-night stand in city after city, country after country: the bare historical facts of places and dates are not, of themselves, enthralling. Whatever the level of art created, the statistical record of the unending tour is the opposite of fascinating reading. Eleven musicians were on retainers from Dylan between the summer of 1988 and the autumn of 1992. Some of them were crucial to his performances; not one played a significant role in his life. He worked almost ceaselessly. It left the rest of his existence all but empty of incident.
In August 1990, his marriage to Carolyn Dennis had ended. Since the final dissolution in 1992 she has barely said a word about the relationship and nothing about the reasons for the split. In 2001, provoked finally by revelations in the Howard Sounes biography Down the Highway that a child had been born and a wedding had taken place, Dennis did release a brief statement. Plainly unhappy that her privacy had been breached, she said: ‘To portray Bob as hiding his daughter is just malicious and ridiculous. That is something he would never do. Bob has been a wonderful, active father to Desiree.’ Dennis went on to explain that she and Dylan had taken advantage of a California law that allowed them to seal their marriage certificate from public scrutiny. ‘Bob and I made a choice,’ the singer said, ‘to keep our marriage a private matter for a simple reason – to give our daughter a normal childhood.’ Finally, in an attempt to kill off a persistent piece of speculation over Dylan’s motives for his ceaseless travels, Dennis added: ‘To say I got a huge settlement that forced Bob to do concert tours is fictitious, irresponsible and hurtful.’
/> In the first three years of the 1990s he put on an average of 95 shows annually during those tours, taking his music to all corners of North America, to Europe, to Central and South America, and to Oceania. It didn’t leave much time for a marriage, or for anything else. For most of the period there was room only for bad habits and peculiar incidents. In February 1991, for example, the organisers of the Grammy Awards had the actor Jack Nicholson present Dylan with one of those obituaries disguised as a ‘lifetime achievement’ prize at a ceremony in New York. First he sang ‘Masters of War’ very badly just as American troops were preparing to retake Kuwait. Then he gave a strange, halting little acceptance speech to the audience at Radio City Music Hall. ‘My daddy,’ Dylan said, ‘he didn’t leave me too much.’
You know, he was a very simple man and he didn’t leave me a lot, but what he told me was this … [Here Dylan allowed himself a lengthy pause while some in the crowd laughed.] He said, ‘You know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you, and if that happens God will always believe in your own ability to mend your ways.’
It was the statement of a man who considered himself to be a Jew: Dylan was paraphrasing a passage from a nineteenth-century rabbinical text.13 It was no joke, either; despite the laughter of a puzzled audience, he didn’t joke about his father or rabbinical texts. Why he would also have considered himself to be ‘defiled’ is, however, as puzzling as his reasons for sharing his guilt with an audience full of rich, sleek and bewildered music-industry types. Perhaps a reported case of flu had left him in poor spirits. Equally, it might be that spirits of another sort had given him an existential hangover.