Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan

by Bell, Ian

  As with Dylan’s born-again albums, there was nothing about any of this that sounded remotely like joy. Equally, there was nothing that didn’t sit easily with messianic Judaism. The only way to argue otherwise is by dismissing any possibility that the songs contain autobiographical content while simultaneously ignoring the artist’s previous declarations on God and related topics. Time Out of Mind might have marked the start of one last, startling resurgence in Dylan’s creativity, but religious faith endured. His ‘late period’ work, as remarkable as anything he had achieved, would be at least as devout as the charmless proselytising songs of 1979–81. Time Out of Mind was filled, as the writer would tell the New York Times, ‘with the dread realities of life’.6 He would employ the adjective with care. Dread can mean fear, in the usual usage, but it also has an older sense, meaning awe. For a man in a certain frame of mind, it could mean two things at once.

  *

  Dylan had begun to write again, so it appears, while snowed up at his Minnesota farm during the winter of 1995–6. What isn’t clear is what spurred him to begin to write then and there, or caused him to write in a new way. In his own mind, as he would tell the story, he had given up on the art. The need had disappeared. No song demanded to be written, no creative urge was so overwhelming it could not be denied. The death of Jerry Garcia and his own darkening mood, one that caused Dylan to seem to shun most of the normal forms of human contact, are therefore only partial, proximate explanations for the Time Out of Mind songs. There had been plenty of other trials in his personal life that might have caused him to pick up pencil, his second divorce and some very public drunken misery above all, but nothing had forced new work. Suddenly the songwriting began again, just like that, despite all the long, arid years. Perhaps, for these things happen, Dylan enjoyed a kind of spontaneous remission in which his gift was restored miraculously to health. Perhaps the belief that he was running out of time provided inspiration. It might also be that sheer necessity forced him back to work.

  He could tell Edna Gundersen that it ‘mortifies me to even think that I am a celebrity’, that losing anonymity ‘short-circuits your creative powers’. True enough, no doubt, but these were problems that went with the territory of stardom, a landscape he understood as well as anyone.7 The parallel fact was that unless he chose to retire entirely, unless he decided to give up performing along with writing, Dylan had a choice. Either he could come up with something new, or he could become the fading star of a touring nostalgia show, ‘reinterpretations’ and all. One way or another, he was running out of road.

  Dylan had done his two albums of old folk and blues songs. He had failed, for whatever reason, to extract anything he wanted to use from fine performances at The Supper Club. The greatest-hits packages could arrive at intervals (and with increasing frequency) in the hope that the eyes and ears of still another generation might be caught, but that was a game of diminishing returns. Unless he could record a new album, ‘Bob Dylan’ would become a performer represented only by the marvels of the Bootleg Series, those tell-tale signs of an encroaching history, and by concerts dependent on the old songs, each performance appropriated the instant it happened by real bootleggers. The shows meanwhile varied horribly in quality and they catered, too often, to a self-selecting niche audience.

  One myth of the unending tour rests on Dylan’s declared intention to find himself new customers who did not wish simply to gawk at the legend and demand the old hits as they thought they remembered them. In the 1990s, his concert crowd were often younger, it’s true, than the fans attracted by most of his peers. For better or worse, he also managed to inherit a choice collection of Deadheads after Jerry Garcia’s passing. Nevertheless, a great many among the college-age generation were still turning out at Bob Dylan shows just to see what all the fuss had once been about. Without new songs it was not, as marketing folk say, a sustainable strategy. That left only the problem of actually writing and recording those new works. It was one thing to decide what had to be done, quite another to carry it off.

  By Dylan’s own account – one account, at any rate – none of the above bears any resemblance to the truth. In 2006, he would tell the novelist Jonathan Lethem blithely that Time Out of Mind had come about almost against his will. Someone had pointed a loaded cheque book at him. The album wasn’t personal, just business. And seven wasted years of his artistic life had been his choice. Dylan would say:

  They gave me another contract, which I didn’t really want. I didn’t want to record anymore, I didn’t see any point to it. But, lo and behold, they made me an offer and it was hard to refuse. I’d worked with Lanois before, and I thought he might be able to bring that magic to this record. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a try.’8

  In another version of events, he showed some songs to Daniel Lanois in June 1996. ‘I had the songs for a while,’ Dylan would say, ‘and I was reluctant to record them, because I didn’t want to come out with a contemporary-sounding record.’9 Contrary to the suggestion that he had written the album while on the farm, in this interview the artist would claim that the Time Out of Mind works had been assembled on the road, enabling him to run through material with the band and ‘hear it right’. In all probability, lyrics were drafted in Minnesota and refined in rehearsals and at soundchecks. There had also been at least one informal recording session before Lanois was called in. Thereafter a lot of serious rewriting would take place while the album was being made at the Criteria studios in Miami, Florida, in January 1997.

  Talking to the Irish Times in October, just after the album’s release, the producer would remark, perhaps a little disingenuously, that Dylan had ‘slowed down writing for a while, then came back at it with a vengeance’. Lanois would also remember that ‘when we first got together he didn’t play me any songs; he read me the songs. He read twelve lyrics back-to-back for an hour and it was like listening to someone reading a book. Then later, in the studio, he modified the lyrics.’ Nevertheless, Dylan would tell USA Today: ‘There was no pressure on me to write these songs. There was no one breathing down my neck to make this record.’ The album had just ‘happened when I had the time’.10 So much for the contract offer that couldn’t be refused, then.

  In one way, the euphoric reviews and the Grammy awards it earned – Album of the Year, ‘Best Contemporary Folk Album’, ‘Best Male Rock Vocal Performance’ – did Time Out of Mind a disservice. They gave the appearance that an album containing greatness was itself, in the round, a great piece of work. Where Dylan was concerned, people were beginning to hear what they wanted to hear. Lustre was granted to some mediocre tracks simply because of the refulgent things around them on the album, because Dylan was ‘back’, because all was somehow right with the world. The acclaim was also a distraction. As it transpired, seven years of silence as a writer had taught the artist nothing useful about assembling a collection of diverse songs and resolving any contradictions, thematic or musical, that might exist between them. Time Out of Mind was not, by a dirt-road country mile, the album it should have been. By 1997, the statement had so many antecedents it was becoming either redundant, annoying, or the only insight worth possessing. In due course the set would be better understood than it was on first hearing, thanks partly to the bootleggers and thanks, belatedly, to Dylan’s own Bootleg Series. That would not solve all the proliferating riddles. Perceptions of this artist were becoming peculiar, dislocated in time, dependent on who heard what and when they heard it. The Bob Dylan story had acquired a set of conflicting time schemes and a host of complicated themes.

  *

  Think back. There was the artist of public record who had first sung into John Hammond’s microphone on a couple of cold November days in 1962 and gone on to create a catalogue of available works of which, in studio-made album form, Time Out of Mind was the 30th. There was the artist who had disrupted every media narrative with his unpredictability and his tendency to mock anyone who tried to understand what he was about. There was the artist whose work ha
d been chopped and diced – seasoned, too – a thousand times over according to the tastes, intuitions and prejudices of those who ‘interpreted’ and understood his work in a myriad ways. There was the artist whose glorious past had been locked in synchronous step with his difficult present since the release of Biograph in 1985.

  Then there was the semi-secret artist, the one who existed in parallel dimensions, supposedly, alongside the public works. Bootleg Dylan, off-the-record Dylan – for some, ‘the real Dylan’ – had been haunting art and artist ever since word of the basement tapes first got out in the summer of 1968. His own Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 had only added another couple of lengths of rope to the big, tangled Gordian ball. One mass of people heard a Dylan song every now and then and sometimes bought an album if he didn’t sound too weird. Another tribe were plain Bob Dylan fans who bought most of the records most of the time. A third group, small but growing, were ever-present. These fans possessed, so they believed, a larger idea of what this artist had done thanks to all the recordings he had failed to complete or failed to release. Finally, welcome at every party, there were assiduous scholars representing the meta-universe of criticism in which significance always trumped a mere song. A few of these were folk whose fluid sense of reality had long since gone down the drain, such was their need to confuse private obsessions with Dylan’s utterances. By 1997, in short, things had become messy.

  Dylan had done more for bootleggers and the idea of bootlegging than any other performer. This had not been his choice, but a few faintly absurd beliefs about the prophetic voice of a generation had got out of hand long before the ’60s were done. In essence, those beliefs had become specimens of the irrational urge for ‘alternatives’ that had turned Carlos Castañeda into a bestseller, seen gurus taken seriously, or caused millions to decide they were born again. Crudely put, the ramshackle argument went as follows. If Bob Dylan was a true poet, insightful and prophetic, privy to an understanding denied to all others, everything he said, did or put on tape was, by definition, a big deal. Everything.

  The fact that the prophet denied this nonsense, or just made his professional, creative choices, right or wrong, was neither here nor there. ‘Bob Dylan’ did not belong to Bob Dylan. A.J. Weberman’s somewhat sinister and mostly comical ‘Dylan Liberation Front’ had been founded at the start of the 1970s thanks entirely to this circle-jerk consensus. It was cult thinking, if thinking is the word, but it was not much worse than some of the never-ending tour chatter, or those postmodern critical fads that allow no houseroom to the idea of authorship. Great White Wonder, first of the bootlegs, had justified itself in the summer of 1969 with the implicit claim that ‘Bob Dylan’ was too important to be impeded by some mere breadhead superstar just because he wrote, recorded and imagined he owned the art. That he gained not a penny piece from his ‘liberation’ while counter-culture entrepreneurs did very nicely was a detail beneath consideration. That he was being denied any say in the fate of his work was barely considered. This art belonged to all. Theft was an act of love.

  The number of Dylan bootlegs is impossible to estimate. Plenty were available before he began to tour relentlessly in 1988. Since then, judging by list upon endless list of titles, he has been honoured by illicit taping far more often than anyone else in the music business. That statement has been made often enough. Few pause to ask just why it should be true when there are plenty of rock stars vastly more popular than this artist. Yet if Dylan opens his mouth on a public stage, recordings will circulate within hours or days. Things will ‘leak’ from his offices; tapes will ‘appear’ whenever he enters a recording studio. In one madcap conspiracy theory the wily genius is complicit in all of this, giving his tacit permission to the bootleggers just to advance the sales of his own Bootleg Series and perpetuate all the legends he claims to despise. No one needs to enlarge bootlegging’s excuses to that extent. The security measures imposed by his management would shame the CIA. Through it all the convenient idea persists that Dylan’s art is not his own, that no creative choice over this track or that truly matters, that no album is ever complete just because he says so.

  The fans who cannot resist bootlegs – let’s call that a motes and beams discussion – not only deny Dylan ownership and earnings in his work, they deny him an artist’s right to decide when a recording is complete, good enough or not good enough, a piece he will claim in Bob Dylan’s name or reject. To be a writer in such a circumstance must be tricky. For a writer who cultivates mystique as a matter of personal psychological need, the tape thief hovering always at his shoulder must be an unabating royal pain. Yet what leaves every argument stalled is that bootleggers have been dead right from the start about one thing. You can’t begin to see the scale of his achievement unless you know about the songs that were left off Dylan’s ‘official’ albums. Such is the implicit justification, after all, for his own Bootleg Series.

  Time Out of Mind was no different from albums that had gone before. Some of the people who had worked on the project were dismayed, to say the least, by the choices Dylan made. Most listeners, informed by bootlegs or the Bootleg Series, arrive at the same view. The chorus sounds: what was he thinking? What gets forgotten is the small truth that if Bob Dylan was like everyone in the chorus he would not be Bob Dylan. The frequently heard claim that he has ‘borrowed’ too often from the works of others faces a similar objection. Which song has he not improved in the process? So why then shouldn’t he know better when it comes to his own albums than those who write big books and couldn’t find the light switch in a recording studio? Still, scribblers and fans demur.

  To complicate matters further (yet again), some of the bootleggers had acquired the sheen of professionalism and entrepreneurial gall by 1997. In certain offerings they were doing a better job of representing the artist and the art than his planet-crushing Japanese media contract-owners were managing. In 1995, conspicuously, the person-behind-the-people at an outfit calling itself Scorpio had answered Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volumes 1–3 with an impertinent thing entitled The Genuine Bootleg Series. Along with some taunting images of macaws on your discs, you got three CDs full of outtakes and live recordings that in some important respects made the Dylan-Columbia release seem a little grudging.

  Much of the material had been bootlegged before, but this package was high-quality contraband for a general audience. There were some fascinating photographs and a wealth of documentary information. Each and every stage in Dylan’s career was sampled, with the totality presented in an expensive-looking ‘glossy full-color’ box. So here was the other ‘Blind Willie McTell’, here was ‘New Danville Girl’ and a chance to hear the version of ‘Hurricane’ pulled from Desire by a record company’s fretful lawyers. The quality of the sound was mostly impeccable: some serious work had been done. Then, in 1997, Genuine Bootleg Series volume two appeared. Remarkably, it was even better than its predecessor, embracing the likes of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ from Carnegie Hall in 1963, a lovely ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ from the Isle of Wight Festival, and the always-preferable ‘Born in Time’ from the Oh Mercy sessions. This was no longer exotica and trivia for obsessed and obsessive collectors. An alternative version of Dylan’s reality was arguing against him. His history was being written and rewritten while his back was turned.

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  It might sound odd, even mean-spirited, to say that Time Out of Mind was the best album he had made in years, yet nowhere near as good as many people wanted to believe. Nevertheless, that still feels like the truth of the matter. Songs such as ‘Dirt Road Blues’ and ‘Million Miles’ are routine, if that, and not much more than padding. ‘Cold Irons Bound’, as a matter of personal taste, is a tough song to like or respect, a piece of overproduced melodrama that seems utterly discrepant on this album. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ should have been shipped off instantly, gratis, to Billy Joel, Garth Brooks and the rest of the balladeers who would take the vapid thing to their sentimental hearts: the cover versions explain the problem. ‘
’Til I Fell in Love With You’ and ‘Can’t Wait’ might have amounted to something had they been handled differently, but in neither case was much achieved with them, either by Dylan or Lanois.

  That leaves five tracks from an album of eleven songs. It also leaves two songs better than most of the rest that the artist declined to share with his public. Of the five, two or three can probably be called great, one can be called interesting, and one is best described as fascinating but, put kindly, a little problematic. In other words, there are what critics like to call difficulties with this album, despite the garlands and awards, despite its great songs, despite its importance in restoring Dylan’s gifts and his claim to public attention. On its release, Time Out of Mind had the benefit of being compared with its immediate predecessors, some truly miserable specimens among them, not with those ’60s and mid-’70s albums that were the artist’s transformative contributions to the canon. The praise for Time Out of Mind amounted to a suspension of historical judgement. A few second thoughts would soon prove that the decade he refused to call his own still had prior claim on Dylan’s artistic posterity. Five very fine songs, a couple of them better than fine, was a hell of a lot more than he had managed on a single album since Blood on the Tracks and Desire, of course. Anyone who found Time Out of Mind ‘disappointing’ on first hearing was employing a very strange yardstick. Nevertheless, the work done in 11 days in January 1997 remained a start, a very good start, not the last word in every argument over Dylan’s rehabilitation.

  The first issue is straightforward: how much better would Time Out of Mind have seemed had ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Red River Shore’ been included? Four songs were discarded from the fifteen recorded for the album, but these two mattered most. Anyone who has heard any of the several versions of the pair will struggle to understand what was going through Dylan’s head. These are works of real literary cunning, both in their deployment of folk ancestry and in their use of narrative personae. On these songs, Dylan speaks in several voices: his own, that of his characters, that of everyman. The titles, by no accident, are plain invocations of an American past, one of the Mississippi Delta under the old apartheid when sometimes a black man’s only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the other of a West that might be a backdrop to the 1948 Howard Hawks film Red River (though the song and the movie have no clear relationship), or just a fable set anywhere along the enormous length of a Mississippi tributary, the Red River of the South (though there are plenty of other Red Rivers). Dylan’s collagist methods have been well researched, from the old blues in the refrain of ‘Mississippi’ to the folk commonplaces that are rearranged and reilluminated, like old mnemonic epithets, all the way through ‘Red River Shore’. A preoccupation with ‘borrowings’ is beside the point, however. Dylan is justifying the claim he began to make decades before: the folk tradition, in style and substance, contains universal truths.