Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  To state the obvious, you cannot ‘reinterpret’ anything unless there is a text prepared for reinterpretation. In Dylan’s case, that will be found on an album somewhere. It is original, fixed (remixing aside) and enduring. The same argument applies to the rejection of biographical approaches and to the claim, useful to certain kinds of critic, that authorship is mostly incidental to art. The problems of biography are familiar and ancient. Facts are slippery, people lie, impressions conflict, memories fade, witnesses are unreliable, most interpretations differ, editorial choices are made: and so what? To leap from these self-evident truths to the claim that any description of a life is irrelevant to a piece of art neglects the obvious: someone did the work, at a certain place, under certain circumstances, for certain reasons. Life, as a song would soon enough mention, is hard.

  The attempt to relegate reality to footnotes can have some amusing consequences. So it is that in a truly illuminating book, Lee Marshall’s Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star (2007), you can find a consideration of the biographical approach and why it has been rejected by certain writers, followed by this statement: ‘Dylan himself has criticised those who offer biographical readings of his songs.’25 Who has done this criticising? What do we know about this critic and why should it matter? You could repeat the questions when the issue of the author and his irrelevant intentions is raised. You could return to the table and lay down a couple of chips when the claim is made that meaning and identity are never ‘stable’. Dylan’s identities – not roles, not masks, not aliases – have come and gone throughout his life. So much is true and such has been his abiding problem. That has nothing to do with meaning. Meaning remains available.

  The belief that concerts without end offer the only authentic insights into Dylan’s art has also led to assaults on anyone who spends time treating the songs as literary works. Granted, the lit-crit approach has its problems. It gets bogged down, inevitably, in spurious debates over whether a songwriter who sings his works and messes around with text and delivery can be a poet. (The better question is to ask what poetry is made of and where the argument lies.) But the rebuttal remains: in the beginning, there was a piece of work, written down, revised and rewritten before it was performed. Someone made that. Once the song was recorded it became a text, with an author who was not ‘privileged’ but still, you can be sure, picking up an author’s royalties. Even the endless arguments over ‘folk process’ do not alter the truth that a person who calls himself Bob Dylan makes Bob Dylan songs before any of the art-in-performance can even begin.

  Sometimes the performances have been vile: there’s that small detail. If the artist on occasion disdains to play in the same key as his musicians, critical theory might be superfluous. Naturally, tour devotees have their answers ready. Marshall writes, disarmingly, that ‘Fans of the N.E.T. do not attend multiple shows because the performances are consistently magnificent’. Instead, these tours ‘create an environment in which special moments can occur’.26 Those ‘outside of the N.E.T. cocoon’ – a revealing word – might not grasp the logic of this, but once you escape ‘the tyranny of recording’ things become easier. So the recorded songs that drew people to Dylan in the first place become secondary to the communal experience of those inside the cocoon. On a good night.

  A bystander might wonder how Dylan gets away with this. A truly thoughtful bystander might then wonder why it is that Dylan, alone among performers, gets away with selling tickets, decade after decade, to a coterie that does not expect him necessarily to be any good. The sheer weight of intellectual effort to understand his work and career has something to do with it, no doubt. The apparent artistic worth of songs whose authorship is, apparently, scarcely important might be another factor. But as Michael Gray has also observed, ‘never-ending-text theory’ can be damned convenient for a writer who is blocked solid.27

  Such was Dylan’s chronic condition for most of the 1990s. What’s fascinating, as a banal biographical detail, is that he persisted with his never-ending tours even as his literary gifts returned, as time and age encroached, as his shredded voice made a nightly mockery of his poetry – an irony rendered as performance art, then – and as his relationship with history, his own history and the history of his country, was altered.

  In 1995, Dylan put on 116 shows in Europe and America. In 1996, he roused himself for just 84 concerts. One of those, for which the press received no invites, was staged in an improvised ‘nightclub’ created within the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, Arizona, at the beginning of February ’96. The writer who thought up a famous line about money preferring expletives to straight talk performed at the Biltmore, in a voice without complaint, before 250 of the guests of Nomura Securities International Inc., the American arm of a transnational high in the empyrean of international finance. Clearly, an author’s intentions had no bearing on any art created that night. For those who trade in financial instruments, it was a $300,000 expense. He opened with ‘Jokerman’.

  *

  Far from the realms of redundant theory, Dylan was making crateloads of money. Howard Sounes arrives at the slightly improbable gross figure of $35 million as the artist’s annual earnings from his tours in the mid-’90s, implying $350,000 nightly and every show a sell-out, but the point stands.28 Even after the crew, the bodyguards, the dependants, the musicians, the functionaries, the management, the accountants, the promoters, the motels, the taxes, the office staff, the transport, the broken guitar strings and all of Mr Dylan’s domestic utility bills had been accounted for, a lot remained. Much of that was earmarked, it seems, for a property portfolio that by mid-1998 would embrace 17 ‘substantial’ pieces of real estate around the world.29 The artist had begun to seem avid for what his brand could earn.

  In October 1996, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’ could be heard advertising a Canadian internet bank. In the years to come corporate offers – for the benefit of Apple Inc., for Victoria’s Secret lingerie, for the Cadillac Escalade ‘luxury sport utility vehicle’ – would not be resisted. ‘The Times’ had already been sold off once, early in 1994, to the tax-efficient accountants at Coopers & Lybrand for the purposes of company self-congratulation before Bank of Montreal was given its bite of the ethical cherry. Perhaps this was Dylan’s idea of subversive social comment. Perhaps he was confirming the death of the author, as demanded by semiotic theory. Or perhaps he just wanted the money. What can be said for certain is that he more closely resembled the CEO of a multimedia enterprise than the person who in 1985 had told Cameron Crowe that rock music had become ‘a highly visible enterprise, big establishment thing’.

  You know things go better with Coke because Aretha Franklin told you so and Maxwell House Coffee must be OK because Ray Charles is singing about it. Everybody’s singing about ketchup or headache medicine or something. In the beginning it wasn’t anything like that, had nothing to do with pantyhose and perfume and barbecue sauce …30

  Later in the interview, Dylan had told the journalist: ‘I’m not selling breakfast cereal, or razor blades or whatever.’ In 2009, nevertheless, he would sell a brutally mashed-up version of his heartfelt song ‘Forever Young’ not to Coke but to Pepsi – slogan: ‘Every generation refreshes the world’ – for a Superbowl half-time advertising spot. Things go better, it transpires, with Bob.

  The biographical approach, lacking rigour, allows for ideas such as presentiment. On 19 November 1995, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, Dylan could be found singing ‘Restless Farewell’, a song he had not performed in public since 1964. The number was a request. The person doing the requesting, so it is said, was Frank Sinatra himself on the occasion of a ‘star-studded’ 80th birthday event in the great singer’s honour. His knowledge of Dylan’s back catalogue had not been noted previously.

  The artist, on the other hand, had always admired Sinatra, Bing Crosby, the late Presley and the rest of the old-style crooners and balladeers who could always hit all the notes. At the Shrine, Dylan sang sincerely and well. He finished up with a
n infinitely modest and infinitely deferential ‘Happy birthday, Mr Frank!’

  So one possible future was glimpsed, perhaps, by the artist who had once written ‘Like a Rolling Stone’. The way things were going, he too was destined to wind up inside the museum, a national treasure, while his posterity went on trial. Dylan was at risk of becoming the author of his own obituary as, unstoppably, the years slipped away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Things Have Changed

  ACUTE PULMONARY HISTOPLASMOSIS IS ABOUT AS MUCH FUN AS IT sounds. Europeans don’t often run the risk of acquiring the ailment, but in parts of America, especially around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the fungal histoplasmosis infection is common enough, generally because of bird or bat droppings in the soil and the microscopic spores the crap generates. Inhale the spores and you might get sick. If you are unlucky, you might get very sick. Dylan was unlucky.

  After he was hospitalised on 25 May 1997, the severity of his illness was explained by a delay in the diagnosis. That’s entirely possible. He had complained of chest pains and inadvertently set running the tale that a heart attack had occurred. Instead, struggling for breath, he was enduring pericarditis, a painful swelling of the fibrous sac around the organ. Since a formal diagnosis of histoplasmosis can often take weeks, during which the fungus is cultured in the lab, the delay wasn’t necessarily surprising. If properly treated with antibiotics, the infection is rarely fatal, but what soon became known as Dylan’s ‘brush with death’ was unusually nasty.1 Histoplasmosis ‘ranges from the totally asymptomatic or a mild flu-like illness through acute and chronic pulmonary forms’ to (it says here) ‘a severe disseminated involvement primarily of the reticuloendothelial system [by which foreign particles are otherwise cleared from the blood] which may spread to the heart, central nervous system, gastrointestinal tract, and other organs’.2

  In plain language, while most people have no symptoms, or very mild symptoms, Dylan was at the upper end of the unpleasantness scale. Pericarditis in such cases tends to afflict the very young, the elderly, or those who have a compromised immune system. The artist had just turned 56 when he was hospitalised in Los Angeles. He was no kid, but hardly ancient. He was released after just a week, though concerts scheduled for Britain, Ireland and Switzerland in June were cancelled. Yet even by August, when he had returned to touring in the United States, the Dylan who spoke to Edna Gundersen of USA Today was not exactly back to his old self.

  I’m doing as good as I can under the circumstances. I’m still taking medication three times a day. Sometimes it makes me a little light-headed and dizzy. And I need to sleep a lot. I did get the doctor’s OK to do this tour. I guess I’ll make it through … I don’t have the energy I usually have, so I have to save it all to perform. Outside of that, I’m doing as well as I can.3

  Dylan also admitted that he had been off his feet for six weeks, barely able even to walk. ‘When I got out of the hospital, I could hardly walk around my yard,’ he told Gundersen. ‘I had to stay in bed and sleep all the time. I guess it’s a slow process of recuperation.’ Clearly, it had been no minor affliction. At another moment in the interview, Dylan told the journalist that the sheer pain of pericarditis ‘stopped me in my tracks and fried my mind. I was so sick my mind just blanked out.’ Given such consequences, you wouldn’t wish a delayed diagnosis on anyone. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to wonder about the shape Dylan’s immune system was in before he fell sick. Constrictive pericarditis, it seems, is usually a complication of viral infections, less frequently of influenza, rheumatic fever, HIV or tuberculosis. Even for the experts, reasons can be hard to name. Dylan’s brief statement on leaving hospital had made a lot of people smile, but caused a few to wonder. ‘I’m just glad to be feeling better,’ he had said. ‘I really thought I’d be seeing Elvis soon.’

  *

  Presley’s sequinned shade might have been amused to hear that Dylan had contemplated the final curtain after recording his first album of new songs in seven years. Had he taken his last bow, the crepuscular mood of Time Out of Mind would alone have been enough to keep believers in presentiment and grim fate talking long after the event. Since his histoplasmosis had intervened between the recording and release of the longest piece of work he had produced since Blonde on Blonde – the vinyl version would be a double album – these songs ‘about death’ gave a lot of people the wrong idea.

  Some reviewers were certain Dylan had received his intimations of mortality, looked up the number for the King’s celestial direct line, and recorded Time Out of Mind as an acknowledgement of how fragile life can be. Who writes songs with titles such as ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’, ‘Not Dark Yet’ and ‘Cold Irons Bound’ if he hasn’t had his interview with the Reaper? Where histoplasmosis was concerned, those who jumped to conclusions landed badly. The coincidence of illness and songs of melancholic fatalism was arresting, but coincidence it remained. Still, the album that inaugurated the most thrilling of all Dylan’s recurring comebacks was not a work designed to spread sunshine and happy thoughts. The author himself would call Time Out of Mind ‘spooky’. It was as good a one-word description as any. Dylan used the word, he would say, ‘because I feel spooky. I don’t feel in tune with anything.’4

  If thoughts of death had inspired the album, however, they might have had less to do with the artist’s inevitable fate than with the passing of Jerry Garcia on 9 August 1995. The guitarist had barely turned 53 when years of drug abuse and obesity shut down his worn body and distressed mind while he was residing, appropriately or not, in a rehab clinic. Dylan, ever attuned to the larger meaning of loss, had been badly shaken. In a press statement he had said that Garcia ‘wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he will ever know’. In point of fact, the guitarist had been the younger man by better than a year.

  Garcia’s Grateful Dead, it is worth observing, had been famous, or infamous, for their own ‘endless tour’, that gesture against changing times, fashion, common sense and a cynical age. They had defied every problem, personal and professional, just to keep on keeping on. The band toured because the band toured, year after year. Much good it had done Garcia. Music had not been his salvation. Despite Dylan’s eulogy, 30 years on the road had taken the guitarist nowhere in particular save on a version of life’s fated journey. That must have been a thought for the artist to ponder. In an album full of songs of aimless movement, of endless walking, of travel without purpose or end, of images of sickness, love and death, Time Out of Mind would place a higher final value on stoicism than on any other human virtue. It would be droll in places, but only, it seemed, because humanity’s vanity in the face of futility was comical. Dylan’s writing began again, at a best guess, just a few weeks or months after Garcia’s death.

  I was born here and I’ll die here

  Against my will

  I know it look’s like I’m moving,

  But I’m standing still

  Every nerve in my body

  Is so vacant and numb

  I can’t even remember what it was

  I came here to get away from

  Interviewing the artist for a Newsweek cover story after the album’s release, the second, third and fourth things David Gates saw fit to notice were ‘the white hairs among the curls, the two days’ worth of stubble and the 30 years’ worth of lines’.5 The first thing mentioned was a face still capable of spooling through the cycles of inscrutability. The message of the piece was that, despite ‘a near-fatal illness and a near-terminal career slump’, the artist – whose attitude towards ‘the media’ had been poisoned by a ‘hatchet job’ interview with the selfsame magazine in 1963 – was still a figure of cultural importance. It was as though by 1997 a collective decision had been taken that it was necessary for Dylan to matter again. Another comeback was required after all the derision and near-contempt. Time Out of Mind was being greeted with sheer, exultant relief even before Gates sat down with his questions ready
in a fine hotel by the Los Angeles shore. Several critics had been extravagant in their praise for the album.

  Early in the interview, Dylan made a remark that would attract a lot of attention from those still trying to work out where he stood on issues of faith and belief. He would return to the theme several times in other encounters with journalists. Speaking to Gates, it sounded as though he was attempting to explain the album – and therefore to explain himself – by calling a halt to questions about God. Instead, inadvertently or not, Dylan simply confused matters.

  Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest On a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ – that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

  It seemed to explain everything and yet it explained nothing at all. Dylan was not prepared to give allegiance to a particular creed, but that was hardly news. In fact, any half-attentive listener to Time Out of Mind would be left wondering about the lazy claim, persistent still in 1997, that he had long before returned to ‘secular’ music. He might have sounded world-weary; he might have seemed obsessed with mortality and the passing of time; but his album was another deeply religious piece of work. ‘Tryin’ to Get to Heaven’ was unambiguous, but there were plain declarations of faith scattered everywhere throughout the recordings, obvious enough even for those who cared nothing for the ‘biographical approach’. Thus: ‘I know God is my shield and He won’t lead me astray’ (’Til I Fell in Love With You’). Thus: ‘I know the mercy of God must be near’ (‘Standing in the Doorway’). Thus: ‘It’s mighty funny, the end of time has just begun’ (‘Can’t Wait’).