by Bell, Ian
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart’s in the Highlands
I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go
Fantasy? If not strictly of the Scottish variety, bluebells certainly blaze in gloomy Highland woods in May. A pedant could protest, however, that the coastal city of Aberdeen is a good distance from the mountains. That’s certainly true. So is Dylan letting his romantic imagination run wild just to provide images of purity to contrast with the rest of his blackly comical talking blues? No doubt. But Aberdeenshire’s main rivers, the Don and the Dee, do in fact rise in the Highlands, the latter at a great height in the western Cairngorms. Equally, though a later line in the song invoking ‘the beautiful lake of the black swan’ might have been created just to achieve a rhyme with ‘break of dawn’, there are a couple of Aberdeenshire lochs where black swans are sometimes seen. With Dylan, you never quite know. We do know, however, that late in 2006 the artist and his brother David spent a reported £2 million buying a mansion called Aultmore House near Nethy Bridge in the Cairngorms foothills. Nethy Bridge is known, for what it’s worth, as ‘the village in the forest’. In the right season there are bluebells in the woods. There’s honeysuckle, too, at other times.
Dylan might have made some good guesses, then. It is a fact, on the other hand, that in his earliest days in Greenwich Village he was well acquainted with the Scottish traditional singer Jean Redpath. She arrived in New York in March 1961 and sang at Gerde’s Folk City to great acclaim. She also won one of those precious rave reviews from the New York Times that could launch a career back then. Redpath, it should be added, is the world’s best-known interpreter of the songs of Robert Burns. She has recorded at least 180 of them.
You could speculate a little more. The first play by the Armenian American writer William Saroyan was a comedy entitled My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939). Aside from the presence of a octogenarian Scottish ham actor and escapee from an old folks’ home by the name of Jasper MacGregor, it has more to do with a poverty-stricken self-styled poet and his Armenian family struggling to survive in Fresno, California, in 1914 than it has to do with Burns. Nevertheless, the play takes its title from the song for much the same reason that Dylan and the Scottish poet saw fit to borrow a line: for an idea of a lost but remembered Eden, far from the squalor of present reality. The point of this kind of borrowing is the fact that the words appropriated are familiar to the audience. Was the artist familiar with Saroyan’s work? It would be surprising if a literate person of Dylan’s generation was ignorant of a writer who influenced the Beats and was furiously prolific, if by then unfashionable, throughout the ’50s and ’60s. As to the little play, there is no way of knowing, though Dylan is full of surprises where literature is concerned. At one point in Saroyan’s comedy, in any case, a character remarks, ‘In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.’ Time Out of Mind says much the same thing. Time had become Dylan’s chief preoccupation.
‘Highlands’ begins among the mountains and streams. Then the singer awakens from his bad dreams to ‘the same old page / Same ol’ rat race / Life in the same ol’ cage’.
I don’t want nothing from anyone,
Ain’t that much to take
Wouldn’t know the difference
Between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me
All is phoney and time is running away. While someone is yelling at him to turn the music down – the music of Neil Young, in Dylan’s little joke – the speaker’s mind drifts back again to a place where the heavens take their cue from the old spiritual in ‘Big white clouds like chariots that swing down low’. Along the way, Dylan gives a brief nod to another poet. ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ was first published in 1939, just months after the death of W.B. Yeats. It ends:
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Dylan sings:
If I had a conscience, well, I just might blow my top
What would I do with it anyway?
Maybe take it to the pawn shop
Most writers would settle happily for the oppositions Dylan has set up in the first third of the song. On the one hand are those (apparently) imagined idyllic Highlands, the ‘Only place left to go’; on the other, raw and alienating urban life. Here’s heaven against daily hell. Perhaps, indeed, it’s the actual paradise of Dylan’s faith set against his miserable mortal existence. After all, these Highlands are a place the singer can only get to ‘one step at a time’. This is more than enough, surely, for a song with which to end an album imbued throughout with ‘dread realities’? Dylan isn’t satisfied.
The seven verses of what is sometimes called ‘the restaurant scene’ interrupt and disrupt ‘Highlands’. They involve a dialogue between the singer and a waitress in a near-empty joint somewhere in Boston. In part, they are Dylan’s reflections, very funny reflections too, on art, the artist and the audience. It is almost as though he is pausing mid-song to tell you about songwriting. Or rather, to explain why he can’t tell you much about songwriting.
She knows he’s an artist, a visual artist, and demands a portrait. He has no drawing book; she says – for what is art really worth? – that a napkin will do. As blues innuendo demands, he can’t locate his pencil, but when she helps him out and he draws her picture she’s disgusted: ‘That don’t look a thing like me!’ By this point in his life Dylan had spent years listening to mockery of his ‘incomprehensible’ songs and impossible voice. Relentlessly, the conversation switches to books. She decides that he ‘don’t read women authors’. We can take this to mean that the songwriter has idealised or despised women but never truly understood them. He disagrees and in the best pure joke in the song bathetically names Erica Jong, the self-appointed authority on female sexual desire, as one author he knows something about. The artist and his entirely unimpressed audience have failed to establish any sort of contact. When her back is turned, he slips away.
By the song’s end, his Highlands are the hills of the Scottish Borders. Dylan is taking his geography from a confused reading of a couple of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, or glimpsing a landscape from the back of a limousine as it returns from the north of Scotland. Back in Boston, crossing the street, ‘Talking to myself in monologue’, wishing he could trade places with the young, he knows himself to be ageing. Dylan might deny it, but if ‘Highlands’ had anything at all to do with his life – the restaurant scene has a strong flavour of a superstar’s reality – those intimations of mortality are everywhere. Before he’s ‘Over the hills and far away’, following a songline far older than his own country, the penultimate verse is plain enough. If it is even slightly autobiographical, the critics Dylan would dismiss, the ones who talked about age and a sense of mortality, perhaps had a point.
The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it’s not like the sun that used to be
The party’s over and there’s less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away
‘Highlands’ might be structurally unsound, but give Dylan credit. To begin an album with ‘Love Sick’ and close it with a sixteen-and-a-half minute song after so long a silence was audacious. Time Out of Mind was brave as well as bold. Dylan had not hesitated to follow his art wherever it led, however dark and forbidding the destination. He had not pandered to anyone. Greil Marcus, reviewing the album for the San Francisco Chronicle, said as much: ‘This is as bleak and blasted as any work a major artist in any field – and by major artist I mean an artist with something, a reputation, an audience, to lose – has offered in ages.’14 A writer who had followed Dylan’s career from the very beginning was taken aback, observing
: ‘At first the music is shocking in its bitterness, in its refusal of comfort or kindness.’ Though it no doubt suited a few of his theses, the critic went on to say something that was equally important. ‘Verbal, melodic, and rhythmic signatures from ancient blues and folk songs fit into the songs on Time Out of Mind,’ he wrote, ‘as naturally, seemingly as inevitably, as breaths.’ In case anyone had missed the point about ‘the reappearance of the forgotten past in an empty present’, there was also the fact that Dylan had induced Columbia to revive its 1920s ‘Viva-Tonal Recording’ label for his album, a label that had once been reserved for ‘race’ records and poor-white country music.
‘Learning to go forward by turning back the clock,’ Dylan had written in his World Gone Wrong notes. Like everyone else, Marcus had only glimpsed what the artist was about. It was not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, or a retreat into older ways of making music in an effort to revive his interest and career. Time Out of Mind was not, in any case, quite as obviously ‘ancient’ as the reviewer meant his readers to believe. Lanois would be criticised by other writers for too often creating an ambience that was anything but natural. Nevertheless, with a sense of mortality comes a sense of history. Dylan had seen the future often enough, generally when he was busy inventing it, and it didn’t work. All the clues to his present, and to America’s present, were in the past. If that was where enduring reality was to be found, that was where Dylan was heading.
*
Bill Clinton had won his second presidential election with decisive ease on 5 November 1996. In January 1997, while Dylan was still deep in the struggle for Time Out of Mind in the Criteria studio in Miami, the 42nd president took the oath of office once again. That was when his troubles really began.
Trouble had followed Clinton doggedly for years, like some personal weather front forever threatening a catastrophic deluge. He seemed to have a talent for turning triumphs into squalid disasters before always managing, always at the last, somehow to beat the odds and the rap. Sex was his abiding problem. Clinton had a seemingly incorrigible taste for adulterous sex and a knack for the lies that are the soundtrack to philandering. The other small blight on his presidency was that America’s conservatives detested him viscerally. Their loathing was awesome, even pathological, an animus less political than wholly personal. The politics was mostly trivial. Having shed any pretence of progressive intent after a couple of rough years in office, Clinton’s team had huddled defensively around the centre ground, making a virtue of the vice of ‘triangulation’ – in effect, campaigning against friends and enemies alike to avoid seeming partisan – and eschewing anything with a hint of ideology or risk. To the new breed of media Republicans, shouting into microphones, hectoring their readers, spreading tales of Clinton’s crimes without number, none of that mattered. They had a vendetta going. With a passion that approached obsession, they hated this Democrat because they feared his political gifts. They wanted him destroyed. In a truly tawdry scandal that erupted almost exactly a year after his second inauguration, Clinton’s enemies thought they had him.
At times it seemed he was giving them all the help they needed. His wife, Hillary, would blame a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ for all the woes of the first family. There would be evidence enough for the claim. First amendment rights had long made America fecund ground for the propagation of outrageous libels. Clinton, as though driven by a secret need to be caught and condemned, acted as though he was only too happy to oblige his antagonists. Yet he broke no law save when lying under oath about his private and legal, if unsavoury, affairs, above all his casual liaison with a young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. His real crime was to hand too much material to stand-up comedians, for nothing else of importance could be made to stick. When compared with Nixon, he was constitutional small fry. Yet it was Bill Clinton who would become the first American president since the unlamented Andrew Johnson in 1868 to face impeachment proceedings for providing ‘perjurious, false and misleading testimony’ to a grand jury.
This was a peculiar moment in American politics. It meant that something fundamental had changed. There was poison in the air and vitriol in every argument. The rest of the democratic world looked on amazed as its self-proclaimed leader, ‘the essential nation’, embarked on a virtual civil war over a head of state’s problems with his marriage vows. That morality American-style was merely an excuse was well understood. But an excuse for what, exactly? The hysteria and hatred seemed to speak of a profound instability within society. Dylan would record a song for a movie just after Clinton’s impeachment. ‘People are crazy,’ the refrain would say, ‘and times are strange.’
Despite everything, as his admirers still recall, Clinton would leave office with the highest approval ratings of any president since the Second World War. One sign of strange times was that his enemies would simply ignore the fact. Clinton was more popular during his second term, amid the blizzard of scandal, than during his first. If a 61 per cent Gallup average rating for his second period in office bore any resemblance to reality, millions of Americans who voted against him in the presidential election were still prepared to say he had done a good job.15 On 23–24 January, one week after the Lewinsky scandal broke, 58 per cent of those polled said they approved of the job Clinton was doing. Thereafter, his popularity increased. On 19 December 1998, while the House of Representatives was voting to impeach their president on charges of perjury and the obstruction of justice, his approval rating rose to 73 per cent. Not only did the vast majority of Americans refuse to care about Clinton’s private sexual behaviour, they objected to anyone trying to make an issue out of his failings.
Instead, they were grateful to him. Clinton had disappointed liberals systematically, but middle America chose to see existence through the bright prism of the economy. Three weeks after the second inaugural the Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed above 7,000 for the first time in its history. With a couple of blips along the way, it went on rising. In May 1997, unemployment fell below 5 per cent for the first time since 1973. To Bill Clinton’s 266,489,999 fellow Americans, such facts trumped any sexual impropriety. In that year, 81.7 per cent could declare that they had completed high school; 23.6 per cent had finished four years of college. They had 212 million motor vehicles and 192 million firearms between them, but possession of the latter, confined to 25 per cent of adults, was in decline. True, 13.8 per cent of Americans, fully 36.4 million souls, were still living below the poverty line, but the country had seen worse. Most had not seen better times since the 1960s. ‘Slick Willie’ Clinton, glib and grinning, soulful when required, solemn when the occasion demanded, happy to be all things to all the voters he could convince, was delivering.16
Conservative loathing for the President of the United States would not abate. The more popular he grew, the more the right fumed and raved. It didn’t matter what the opinion polls said. One America, with one idea of the country’s nature and purpose, held the other in contempt. The feeling had been growing for a while. Before long the belief would become a cliché. Politically, culturally, socially, by geography and sometimes by ethnicity, the republic had become divided against itself. What one of his aides would call ‘the Clinton wars’ were the public expression of a deeper truth.17 He was the symbol, the lightning rod, simultaneously a sworn enemy and the people’s champion.
In himself, this president was a kind of parable. The man from Hope, Arkansas – a town that might have been created for a campaign slogan – could seem like the embodiment of the old dream that encouraged every kid from a modest, difficult background to aim for the White House. In the right light, he could look like the last best hope (indeed) of ’60s liberalism. But he had a bad habit of betraying those who believed in him most. Morally, his outlines were as blurred as a silvery fog. Personally and politically, he was a mass of contradictions, both idealistic and cynically expedient, inspirational and capable of producing a deep disillusionment.
Even the apple of prosperity Clinton gave to
the American people had a worm at its heart. A lot of cheap, dangerous credit had bought his popularity. When in November 1999 his signature brought an end to the Glass–Steagall Act that had hindered banks from playing roulette with depositors’ money, consequences followed. One was the near collapse in 2008 of the entire banking system, with it the economy of the western world. Clinton achieved federal budget surpluses, it is true, but private individuals were borrowing all they could and spending all they could. When the banks were ‘liberated’, with his enthusiastic support, a disaster was set in train. Like the president’s affairs, the ’90s were only good while they lasted.
It was an apt moment, whether he realised it or not, for Dylan to have his mind filled with the music of the 1920s and 1930s. The truth about what was to befall America in the twenty-first century could be found, had anyone bothered to wonder at the end of the ’90s, in those bygone eras. That music was the story of how the people had behaved in hard times.
*
Dylan didn’t pause for long after finishing his album. By the second week in February 1997 he was back on tour for a round of concerts in Japan. Unless you have an unnatural taste for endless lists of the which-songs-were-played-where variety, the narrative for this and most of the following few years becomes predictable, not to say tedious. The known story of a life involves some public events, some private matters, an interview here and there and the wait, generally a long one, for an album of new work while Dylan toured on and ever on. In 1997, his shows would scarcely differ in format or style from the shows of 1996. Even after recovering from his encounter with histoplasmosis Dylan would sometimes seem exhausted on stage – during several concerts in August he was forced to sit down between songs – but nothing, so it seemed, would keep him from girdling the planet to play his shows.
Back in the real world, his contemporaries were disappearing, one by one. By default, and by dint of sheer, stubborn perseverance, a 56-year-old Dylan was becoming a grand old man. He was to issue a lot of brief obituaries and sing numerous songs in tribute to the dead in 1997 and in the years after. The pop world he had transformed a generation before had made a virtue of transience, of always moving on, of forever discarding its brief past for the sake of an alluring, insistent future. By the ’90s, the remaining pioneers, hucksters, wounded saints and one-hit wonders of the 1960s were discovering what transient really means. Richard Manuel and Jerry Garcia had already quit the field. On 5 April another private matter intruded when Dylan was told that Allen Ginsberg had died at his home in Greenwich Village of liver cancer and its complications.