by Bell, Ian
Life on the road was hardly likely to have rendered Dylan pure in body and mind. The shows he had given just days before in Scotland, Ireland and in London had left even hardcore fans shocked by his demeanour and his grisly performances. Reviewers were writing openly that the star appeared to be drunk. In the Guardian, Michael Gray had observed that at the start of the first show in Glasgow Dylan ‘shuffled onstage wearing a tartan jacket and looking like he’d had a drink’.14 Another who was there would report that the next night’s burlesque was no more reassuring. The artist ‘certainly seemed to be the worse for alcohol at the second Glasgow show, dropping his guitar a couple of times and wandering off stage during “Positively 4th Street”, leaving his astonished band to continue without him’.15
These were not isolated incidents. All the credibility Dylan had accumulated with his return to touring was being dissipated by a drunk and an unrehearsed group of confused musicians who were sometimes worse while sober than the boss deep in his cups. In London, people walked out. Those who stuck around, real fans almost by definition, had the disconcerting (not to say unsatisfactory) experience of being unable to recognise the songs Dylan thought he was singing. The Grammy Awards audience reported the same technical difficulty. These were not ‘creative reworkings’, not deliberate attempts to reawaken interest in familiar pieces by demolishing preconceptions. These were atrocities.
If there was anything to the claim that this artist defined himself in performance, that his real art was the product of the concert stage, both the singer and the songs were being defiled. Had the story ended there, as many thought it might, Dylan would be remembered as just another superstar casualty in the Elvis Presley memorial ward. As it was, Joe Queenan, writing in Spy magazine, would describe the figure who appeared at the televised Grammy awards.
If any of the tens of millions watching had not already realised that Bob Dylan, poet, wit, heart-rending vocalist, hipster, scourge, had turned into Bob Dylan, somewhat pathetic kook – well, now they knew.16
So he felt ‘defiled’. So the question becomes: why carry on disgusting and destroying himself? In his book, Sounes asserts that Dylan was in need of cash because of his divorce. His recent albums had certainly sold badly and he had nothing new, nor even the hope of something new, to offer Columbia. It makes no sense, however, to believe that an individual with Dylan’s instinct for survival would annihilate himself in public once and for all. He had a precious asset, in any case. That he allowed the asset to be exploited just at the moment he was supposedly in dire need is probably an encouragement to cynics, but a few facts are worth bearing in mind. One is that the reports of drunkenness sound nothing like a superstar’s decadence. Alcohol might have crept up on Dylan, but the worst of his behaviour coincided with the aftermath of a divorce and the misery that tends to accompany such an event. He wasn’t in a mess because he was on the road. He was in a mess when he happened to be on the road. Second, even if he allowed Columbia to issue choice parts of his back catalogue at an opportune moment, he wasn’t quite out of a job as a performer. He didn’t quit that job, either, even when all his previous Bob Dylans were supplying the record company with revenue and his alimony had long been covered. Drunk or sober, Dylan wasn’t forced out onto the road.
The next premature obituary arrived, in any case, around a month after the weird affair at Radio City Music Hall. It was welcomed by all save a rueful few capable of making comparisons between the Dylan who had stumbled insensibly around British concert stages and the writer represented by The Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961–1991. The worst that could be said of the compendium was that it laboured under a title better suited to a dusty manuscript folio hidden in library stacks than to one of the great achievements in modern art. Bootleg collectors deprived of their bragging rights would quibble, of course, over the choices made. Many fans would meanwhile wonder about the implicit comment made by this box set on the status of Blood on the Tracks and Infidels. Finally listeners were given the chance to encounter ‘Blind Willie McTell’, or to hear a drastically different account of ‘Idiot Wind’, but that only deepened the mystery of the original albums. There would be frustration, too, that despite the appearance at long last of ‘I Shall Be Released’, the basement tapes were still being denied proper representation. The 58 tracks did not tell the whole story about any period in Dylan’s career. The story they did tell, one only hinted at by the Biograph release, was a tale of startling, enduring achievement that dwarfed Down in the Groove and Under the Red Sky. In fact, it made them look ridiculous.
That might have played on Dylan’s mind, whether he needed the money or not, while the box set was in preparation. On the one hand, Volumes 1–3 was testimony to 30 years of matchless work. No songwriter of Dylan’s or any generation ran it close. On the other hand, this piece of the historical record stopped, much as he had stopped, in 1989, with a debatable remix of the marvellous ‘Series of Dreams’. Even if he had thought to extend this collection, what could he have offered to represent the rest of his labours in the 1980s and 1990s? A ‘Brownsville Girl’, a ‘Born in Time’, or a ‘Handy Dandy’? Add all those and a few others together and you would have a fine album. Count it as the fruits of better than a decade, without the malformed Infidels and the botched Oh Mercy, and it looks like slim pickings. Besides, in March 1991 the 58 tracks on the box set only served to remind Dylan and the world that he had ceased to write anything at all. He showed no signs of resuming the old, addictive habit. Talking to Paul Zollo in April, he would not mention Volumes 1–3. Sounding wistful, the artist would say, however, ‘It’s not to anybody’s best interest to think about how they will be perceived tomorrow. It hurts you in the long run.’17
If so, it helps if you can stay one step ahead of the obituarists. Dylan was having no luck with that. In April and May he trekked up and down America’s east coast; in June he was in mainland Europe for more amplified debacles. Some of these shows were legendarily awful. The only undefiled virtue to which Dylan could still lay claim was his pride. Perhaps the advent of his 50th birthday, the one he said meant nothing to him, had registered after all. Perhaps he simply grew tired of humiliation and self-disgust. Perhaps the sense that he had polluted his talent was truly profound. It might be easier to believe that the old, thrawn tenacity, the bloody-minded stubbornness that had seen him through so many crises, began to reassert itself. He had never knuckled under easily.
Whatever the truth, at some point in the second half of the year, as he travelled America’s highways once more, Dylan found the ability to stay sober for longer. He stayed straight long enough, at least, to give paying customers a glimpse of what they sought. Bootlegs say that late in 1991 the public began once again to get what they had paid for. More than a few of the shows were very good. The only thing Dylan could not offer these people in Texas, Indiana or Ohio was a new song.
There was a contract he had yet to fulfil, with two albums owing, whatever the blockage in his creative plumbing. As 1992 began, Dylan had to solve the problem of supplying Columbia with something while knowing he possessed nothing, nothing at all, of his own. All he could do, therefore, was make a record of other people’s music, but he knew that strategy was risky. Much as he enjoyed covering the songs of others, and as often as the practice had spurred him back to writing in the past, Dylan had never managed to create a successful album as the interpreter of his favourite tunes. Self Portrait, that brave but ill-served experiment, had given him one of the worst moments of his young life. Down in the Groove had not been saved from critical perdition by his variations on themes supplied by other hands. Nevertheless, one fact seems to have made Dylan pause and think straight.
In some of his worst, least coherent concerts the only redeeming moments had come while he performed his brief ‘acoustic’ interludes. In the better shows, as his thirst subsided, Dylan’s explorations of traditional songs had become more than a gesture to a few of the old folk devotees dotted around the halls. The
se songs were his assertion of faith and belief in something that could never be defiled. ‘Trail of the Buffalo’, ‘Golden Vanity’, ‘Two Soldiers’, ‘Roving Gambler’, above all ‘Barbara Allen’, that early love from Dylan’s youth: these and others like them were the songs he understood best and could still perform as well as anyone.
The irony was profound, even poetic. The artist who had once been given so much grief by the guardians of tradition in Greenwich Village would seek his redemption in traditional song. His decision as it formed was also a kind of confession. Whatever else Dylan had made of himself as a writer and performer, whoever he had been or had seemed to be, folk and blues still formed the core of his identity as a musician and as a person. The great revolutionary hadn’t really changed at all. There was wisdom in the old songs, things that could be trusted, a sense both of history and of mystery. This music was life as he understood it.
The beginnings of an insight came to him just as Bill Clinton was spinning glib, comforting tales to the American people. Dylan would make his first attempt to record some of the older songs on 3 June, when the newly confirmed Democratic Party nominee was on a popular TV show playing a bad if exuberant ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on his saxophone. When Clinton accepted the nomination as candidate at his party’s convention in New York in July, he would tell delegates that he had in mind a ‘new covenant’ with America’s people. Dylan sought only a new contract with himself.
Simplicity would be achieved amid complications. First, irrespective of any theories over his motives, Dylan was committed to play plenty of concerts. There would be 92 of those, appropriately enough, in ’92, but they would be scattered across the planet. The artist’s first task in March and April was to show Australia and New Zealand that reports of his living death as a performer were not to be trusted. Then there were engagements on the American west coast to be fulfilled. Europe, then Canada, then another swing through the American Midwest – with no fewer than five nights amid his old Minneapolis haunts – would follow. Dylan would thereafter perform on the east coast of his country before finishing up in November, as had become almost traditional, with a run of dates in Florida. Even amid the insanity of 1966, when he had flown from concert to concert in a ramshackle old jet while trying to write and record Blonde on Blonde before setting out to conquer an obdurate world, he had never tried to make an album under these conditions.
First Dylan somehow found time for sessions in Chicago. Less than a fortnight after finishing up a spring tour of the western states in Las Vegas, of all benighted places, he was working with David Bromberg and a disparate group of musicians at the Acme Recording Studio. The two men had known one another for better than a couple of decades. Bromberg, one of those musicians with a seeming ability to play just about anything, had contributed to Self Portrait and New Morning. As he remembered years later, he had been performing at the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village one February night when Dylan and Neil Young came in. According to what Bromberg was told, ‘Neil had said to Bob’ that a collaboration would be an idea worth considering. At Acme, with a full band, a horn section, fiddle and mandolin players, he and Dylan worked on perhaps 30 songs. What’s striking is that the selection would not necessarily have appealed in every respect to a folk or blues purist. A couple of the numbers were Bromberg’s songs, several others were songs he had made his own. ‘Lady Came from Baltimore’ was a very well-known piece by Tim Hardin, a writer Dylan admired greatly who had died after a long-postponed heroin overdose in 1980. For one track, described as a ‘contemporary Christian’ piece, an entire gospel choir was brought in; for another a zydeco accordion player was hired. Plenty of traditional songs, blues of various vintages, country songs and folk tunes were attempted. But the aim was certainly not to recreate a Dylan performance from the Gaslight Cafe circa 1962.
Reputedly, the artist had driven to Chicago in ‘a truck’, though the description is unlikely to be an exact match for the vehicle. He is also said to have yet again sought a ‘live’ sound. From what has emerged of the tapes, it’s hard to tell whether his wish was granted. By all accounts, nevertheless, these were productive sessions and enough was achieved, in Bromberg’s telling, for an album he believed was worth the effort. Dylan didn’t agree. He was due to play festivals in Europe, starting in Sweden on 26 June, and decided to leave the mixing work to his producer. If that was the case, an album was close to completion. But as Bromberg would explain in 2008:
He left me to mix things and he told me before he left, ‘I’ve usually been on every mix I’ve done, but I trust you. Go ahead and mix it.’ And I think I did a bad job. I didn’t understand what he wanted … When he came back and listened to it, he said, ‘That’s awful. Go back and listen to the roughs.’ I went back and listened to the rough mix and I saw what he was talking about, but he had lost interest … It’s unfortunate that we didn’t get to mix it together because it might have come out.18
Two tracks from the Chicago sessions, ‘Duncan and Brady’ and ‘Miss the Mississippi’, would be made available in 2008 to anyone prepared to buy the three-disc version of the Bootleg Series release Tell Tale Signs. Those recordings fail to make it clear why Dylan would be so dissatisfied with what was done at Acme, but Bromberg probably guessed right: the artist lost interest. For whatever reason, what could have been his best attempt at an album of cover versions had failed to enthuse him, or at least had failed to enthuse him for long.
In July, having concluded his touring business for the moment at the Jazz à Juan festival amid the whispering pines of the French Riviera, Dylan retreated to his Malibu garage, where there was room enough to spare for a modest home studio. In Europe, he had continued his practice of featuring traditional songs such as ‘The Roving Blade’ and ‘The Girl on the Greenbriar Shore’ in his sets. (The latter, performed at Dunkirk on 30 June, would also turn up on Tell Tale Signs.) Back in California, he proceeded to delve far deeper into this heritage than he had been prepared to attempt in Chicago. In one version of events, the initial plan was simply to supplement the recordings he had made with Bromberg. That notion seems to have been discarded quickly. Dylan also forgot any idea of covering contemporary songs. He reverted, in effect, to being a hardcore, uncompromising folk musician. In his own terms, he became a purist.
Good As I Been to You could give the impression that it was recorded at the kind of speed that was customary in the days when Dylan first entered a recording studio. Columbia would certainly make the claim that a disconcertingly ragged-sounding set had been captured in single takes, but that was far from the case. While the engineer, Micajah Ryan, might have been guilty of exaggeration when he said that after the sessions began ‘I didn’t get back to my family until a couple of months later’ – Dylan was on stage in Toronto by 17 August – the technician saw enough of the artist at work on Good As I Been to You and the companion piece World Gone Wrong to dispel any belief that there was busking going on. Dylan would ‘come in each day with at least a couple of songs to work on’, the engineer would remember. ‘He’d do several takes in every key and tempo imaginable; speeding up or slowing down, making it higher or lower in pitch until he felt he got it.’ Ryan would also state that it was the album’s producer, Debbie Gold, who had ‘convinced Dylan to record with just acoustic guitar and vocals’.
Generally described as a ‘long-standing friend’ of the artist, this music industry professional clearly enjoyed his trust. Having been hired as a teenager in 1975 by the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia after the guitarist was impressed by her work at Philadelphia’s Tower Theatre, Gold had also served on Bruce Springsteen’s immense 1978 tour to promote his Darkness on the Edge of Town album. She had first worked for Dylan as ‘production co-ordinator’ on Shot of Love, presumably having met him through the Dead, given that he had been a friend of Garcia since 1972. Dylan valued her, it seems, because she was honest and failed to keep her opinions to herself. She for one – and she might have been the only one – was not intimidated by the legen
d. According to Ryan, the artist
consulted Debbie on every take. He trusted her and I got the feeling that was unusual for him. She was never afraid to tell him the truth, and, boy, was she persistent, often convincing him to stay with a song long after he seemed to lose interest in it.19
If that was the case, Gold could probably count herself Dylan’s most successful producer since John Hammond. Unlike Bromberg, she was not prepared to allow this reborn folk singer to ‘lose interest’. Equally, if Gold had seen the artist at work during Shot of Love she probably had a fair idea of where the source of certain problems might lie. The suggestion that it was ‘unusual’ for Dylan to deal with someone he could trust might explain a number of things about his ’80s albums. How many of those fine, lamented songs were discarded because he had no faith in the pliant opinions of those around him?
As it was, not one of the old songs Dylan had performed on his tours made it to Good As I Been to You. Nor did he have to perform the mundane task of learning the songs he did perform: he knew them all. The memory that once had allowed him to recall ‘hundreds’ of Woody Guthrie numbers was intact in an artist who only a few years before had been incapable of remembering his own lines. Dylan responded viscerally to those aged, often anonymous songs of love, betrayal, revenge and loss. Above all, it seems, he responded to stories, to narrative. For him, emblematic and symbolic tales had always been at the heart of folk. The songs endured, decade after decade and century after century, precisely because of what they had to say about an unalterable human condition. That was why he would talk about them as somehow beyond time, as ancient as myth, as modern as the nightly news. The album kicked off with ‘Frankie & Albert’, for example, in an arrangement that owed everything to the version Mississippi John Hurt had first recorded for Okeh Records in 1928. The story told in the song had been unfolding for centuries – though the specific killing has been located in St Louis in 1899 – and it was probably unfolding somewhere, in one doleful form or another, even while Dylan was recording his album.