by Bell, Ian
Perhaps America’s bravest post-war poet, if not its best, the older man had managed to be both besotted with Dylan and one of the most alert, dispassionate observers of the Dylan phenomenon. Ginsberg had been a profound inspiration for the artist long before their first meeting at a party above a Village bookshop late in December 1963. At minimum, much of what Dylan wrote in the mid-1960s would have been very different had he never read Howl and Kaddish. Not many hours after Ginsberg’s death, the set list for a concert in Moncton, New Brunswick, was altered. That night, Dylan performed ‘Desolation Row’. After it was done, he told the audience: ‘A friend of mine passed away, I guess this morning. That was one of his favourite songs. Poet, Allen Ginsberg.’
Unlike others, that poet had never lost his faith in the possibility of radical change. He had been carried away, ecstatically so, by what he supposed to be the mind-altering epochal significance of the Rolling Thunder Revue. For all his nonsense, Ginsberg had never surrendered his devout belief that Dylan was a revolutionary force. There had been a reason, equally, why the poet had been given the role of ‘The Father’ in Renaldo and Clara. As to art, Ginsberg saw in Dylan the embodiment of what he called ‘poetry-music’, the essence of each recombined in a way that was both ancient and modern. There was an irony in the fact that one man had personified the counter-culture even as the other was rejecting its grandiose claims and messy thinking, but that had never tainted their friendship. The artist had owed a lot to Ginsberg.
With his Buddhist friend gone, Dylan added another creed to his collection by making an appearance at Italy’s 23rd National Eucharist Congress in Bologna on 27 September, three days before Time Out of Mind was released. The event was a Catholic ‘youth festival’ involving two less-than-youthful men and some 300,000 young Italians. Pope John Paul II oversaw events from a throne above the stage, or rather called the shots (though apparently half-asleep for much of the time), while a nervous-looking Dylan offered up ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. Then the artist climbed the staircase, removed his cowboy hat, kissed the pope’s ring and exchanged a few private words, prophet to pontiff. Finally, John Paul did as all good pastors must and took ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, that most ambiguous of songs, as the basis for an unambiguous sermon. The pope said to Italy’s young Catholics: ‘You asked me: how many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man? I answer you: just one. One only.’ You get the gist. Then Dylan finished up with ‘Forever Young’.
There are only two possible explanations for his motives in accepting the engagement. They are not mutually contradictory; quite the reverse. One is that Dylan was not entertaining a dozing pontiff as a charitable gesture. By all accounts, a fee of several hundred thousand dollars was secured from those arranging the show for all those Italian kids. A second explanation is that it did not trouble Dylan in the slightest to sing for a pope who took a dim view of contraception, abortion, gay marriage, left-wing priests and several other things of this world. It is worth mentioning, however, that John Paul had established formal relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel just four years before the Bologna congress. For Dylan, that might have counted for something. Whatever the reasons, this strangest of all his performances was another reminder that any naive souls still hankering after the subversive, mercurial and politically progressive artist of years long gone needed to reset their preconceptions once and for all.
In London, a week later, he would tell Mojo magazine that Bologna had been a ‘great show’. Asked if he was involved in ‘world affairs’, however, Dylan would once again reply, ‘No, I can’t really say that I am.’ Despite histoplasmosis, he was about to face a final run of 32 American dates in a concert schedule that would total 94 performances by the time 1997 was done. In the year ahead, Dylan would surpass even his accountants’ expectations by fulfilling no fewer than 110 engagements across the planet. Yet in talking to journalists he persisted in giving the impression that none of it had much to do with him, or with his wishes. If this was a man bent upon perpetual art-in-performance, he seemed to have no good idea of what his motives might be. Not for the first time or the last, his remarks gave credence to the suspicion that the grand artistic ritual of the alleged tour without end had become aimless, a tedious commercial venture. As he sometimes liked to claim, it was just a job.
I don’t know why people talk about never-ending, because I don’t really consider myself on tour. We just go out and play a certain amount of shows every year, so it isn’t really a tour. It could stop any time. Part of me doesn’t want to do it all. Part of me would just like to be done with it all.18
Roughly a year earlier he had been nominated, finally, for the Nobel Prize in Literature due to be awarded in 1997. Though Dylan laughed off the whole idea when any journalist asked for his reaction, even pretending to be ignorant of what the Nobel signified, it was the beginning of a contest over the nature of literary art that would persist (with ample opportunity for laughter) into the twenty-first century. Allen Ginsberg, stalwart as ever, had written in support of the claim being made on Dylan’s behalf, calling him ‘a major American Bard & minstrel of the XX Century, whose words have influenced many generations throughout the world’. The artist deserved his Nobel, according to Ginsberg, ‘in recognition of his mighty and universal powers’. Professor Gordon Ball had made the formal nomination, stating: ‘In our modern era Bob Dylan has returned poetry to its primordial transmission by human breath and body … in his musical verse he has revived the traditions of bard, minstrel, and troubadour.’19
Nice try. The 1997 prize went instead to the Italian playwright Dario Fo. He was not a popular choice among littérateurs, ironically enough, because the keepers of high culture regarded him as a performance artist rather than a real writer. The Nobel committee recognised this difficulty in their press release announcing the award. It was full of high-flown verbiage about ‘texts’ that were ‘always open for creative additions and dislocations, continually encouraging the actors to improvise, which means that the audience is activated in a remarkable way’. Dylan’s better-read fans could and would take encouragement from that. A playwright whose work depended on performance rather than the printed page? Surely one more obstacle to their candidate’s elevation had been removed.
It might seem like a neat if inadvertent touch, meanwhile, to have had the nomination go forward when finally there was a Dylan album capable of backing up the claims being made for his art. In reality, Time Out of Mind arrived in the stores just a week before the Nobel selectors announced their winner on 7 October. There is therefore the grisly if entertaining possibility that a bunch of nonplussed eminent Swedes believed they were being asked to judge the creator of Knocked Out Loaded and Down in the Groove. In any case, Dylan’s backers hadn’t thought the problem through. Understandably, they took it for granted that everyone had heard of, and heard, their candidate. He is certainly well-respected in Scandinavia, where English-speakers are commonplace. But what was the committee being asked to judge? Printed lyrics in place of their sacred ‘texts’? A group of recordings containing things that sucked along with things that were sublime? And where stood the vaunted Dylan of evolving live performance whose audience ‘is activated in a remarkable way’ (on a good night)?
The persistent belief that the artist’s never-ending candidacy is the victim of snobbery and prejudice towards popular culture, not to mention towards Americans, is probably well founded. Other factors should not be ignored. It is less a question of whether purblind Swedish professors can understand Dylan’s work than of explaining what it is they are being asked to understand. Plenty of reluctant witnesses to his career have had that problem down the years. Calling him an artist is easy. Stating the nature of the art is a trickier task. Ginsberg’s ‘poetry-music’ had been a good stab at a definition, but it was not a complete description.
In January 1998, Dylan did a few shows with Van Morrison. In February, he dispatched another
note of condolence and praise, this time to a funeral mass in Jackson, Tennessee. Carl Perkins, peer to Elvis, writer of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, had died of throat cancer, aged just 65. Dylan’s note read: ‘He really stood for freedom. That whole sound stood for all degrees of freedom. It would just jump off the turntable. We wanted to go where that was happening.’ If there is an art to writing such things, Dylan was becoming adept.
March found him in South America, taking the money (presumably very good money) and swallowing whatever pride was involved in serving as an opening act for the Rolling Stones. In May, as though to prove that finding a new, younger audience was not at all times his priority, he was performing concerts jointly with Joni Mitchell. That month he also found another set of fine and sincere words for the recently deceased Frank Sinatra. None of this activity was of any real significance. As in the aftermath of Oh Mercy, Dylan seemed already to have decided that a creative renaissance could wait. Room had been found in his concerts for songs from Time Out of Mind, but if he was eager to write more, he showed no urgent sign of desire. Patently, making albums was an afterthought.
While Dylan marked fully ten years back on the road and took less-than-onerous superstar gigs with fellow artists of a certain age, October provided a thunderous, bracing echo from his past. It also offered a rebuttal to the never-ending chatter about a never-ending tour. If brevity was the criterion, a title like The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert deserved no prizes. In every other respect the double CD was, as legend and all the real bootlegs had long said, impeccable. Anyone who bought this when it went on sale on 13 October and then caught Dylan’s show in a town called Duluth, Minnesota, just nine days later was invited to contrast and compare. The tour that took the artist to the city of his birth saw some pretty fair performances along the way. It had nothing to compare with a slice of the historical record as it pertained to the events of 17 May 1966.
Dylan would tell interviewers, reasonably enough, that he could no longer be the person who had given that Manchester show, or write those songs, or occupy that near-impossible role, or endure the killing pressures once imposed on a young man not yet 25. All his complaints and explanations were fair. They nevertheless invited the question: who could he be, then, and what could he do as the century approached its end? Time Out of Mind had provided the beginnings of an answer. Yet as the months and the tours came and went he seemed to have no interest in pursuing a conclusion.
In 1999, he would give 119 public performances, breaking his own record once again. Four dozen of these ‘arena experiences’ would be shared with Paul Simon, for reasons probably best explained by the prices the two legends felt entitled to charge. They would not ask for an arm and a leg at every stop along the way while one short man alternated with a shorter man – Dylan won that contest, just for a change – in opening or closing the show. Some customers would get away with surrendering just the contents of a wallet with a couple of fingers attached, depending on what the local nostalgia market would bear. In Raleigh, North Carolina, a loyal fan of one or other star would contemplate a top price of $75; in Camden, New Jersey, the costliest ticket would be $100. A fan in Concord, California, who wanted the best seat in the house could expect to pay $127.50, while in Vegas the top-end entry fee was $150. At Madison Square Garden, New Yorkers who refused to settle for less than the finest accommodation would pay $123. To put this in context, the most expensive ticket for an Eric Clapton show at the Garden two years later would be $80. The highest price demanded by U2 during their blockbusting 2001 tour would be $130.
Money aside, it is hard to identify the purpose and point of the joint-tour exercise. For the most part, predictably, dedicated Dylan fans would enthuse over his performances – though bootlegs say these were nothing special – and pay little attention to Simon. Even those wholly enamoured of the artist would become just a little sceptical, however, about this particular detour on the endless highway. One fan, having attended six shows in a week, would remark after the last night at the Jones Beach Amphitheatre in Wantagh, New York, on 31 July that though the concerts had been ‘very good’ it was all ‘kinda uneventful’.20 Seth Rogovoy, journalist and prolific writer on Dylan, would open a review of a show in Albany, New York, with these words:
Lightning didn’t strike nor did fireworks ignite when Sixties icons Bob Dylan and Paul Simon joined forces on a handful of songs at the Pepsi Arena on Tuesday night. In fact, what on paper might have seemed like a stroke of promotional genius – putting the two folk-rock visionaries together for the first time in their careers for a barnstorming tour of the nation – turned out to be anti-climactic from the get-go.21
Rogovoy, another finding few flaws in Dylan’s own performances, would finish up by remarking that the concert was a failed attempt to produce ‘something new and unique’. Presumably that was not the aim. Nevertheless, when the usual story says that the artist was in the throes of a creative renaissance by the end of the ’90s, it is worth bearing in mind how he chose actually to spend his time. Time Out of Mind and all the publicity engendered by the latest ‘comeback’ were causing a renewed interest in Dylan and his works by the century’s end. The album had sold a million copies. Yet for most of the time this artist reborn was just playing the arena circuit, spinning on a wheel.
The spring of 1999 had seen him return to Europe for the 11th year in succession; the next dozen years would be no different. It would matter greatly to handfuls of devoted people, no doubt, to know who had joined or left the ‘Never Ending Tour Band’, which musician had stayed the course and which one could tolerate the experience the least. In the bigger scheme of things all the theories and tales did not alter the fact that the tours were a poor substitute for creative work. Yet the odd fact remains that Dylan would revive his reputation as a recording artist, and do so emphatically, while treating the making of albums as little more than a necessary chore. The income from concerts meant that he would no longer be in thrall to the despised studio. He could play live and tell some journalists that it was his first and only love, his artistic reality, his whole existence. Others would be told that he could take it or leave it. Did he notice, then, that a big part of his usual crowd were the same people, night after night, following him from venue to venue?
On 10 December 1999, Rick Danko died in his sleep of heart failure, aged 56 and a day. The weight, his own physical weight, had proved too much after a lot of booze and a lot of drugs. The singer and bass player – or trombonist, or fiddle player – who had helped Dylan to write ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ and harmonised with him during several of the songs on the basement tapes, had been in poor shape for a while. He had last played briefly with Dylan in August 1997, when the artist’s tour halted for a concert in Connecticut. Danko had been the Band member who in 1967 spotted that a big pink house in the middle of 100 acres was available in Saugerties, New York. By the late ’90s he and Garth Hudson, the last men standing, had been reduced to travelling from little show to little show in a motorhome. Levon Helm, who had found better things to do with himself, would forever maintain that Danko had worked himself to death because he had never received his fair share of money from The Last Waltz and other Band ventures.
In the summer of 1999, the little town of Hibbing, Minnesota, had begun to lay plans for a new exhibit in its public library. The municipality already had a museum dedicated to its claim to fame as the birthplace of the Greyhound bus line. The Hibbing Historical Society also had a museum to call its own. By the century’s end, nevertheless, the need was felt to recognise another piece of local history. The Zimmerman kid, still remembered by a few older residents, was to be memorialised while he yet lived. Meanwhile, the news that his beloved mother had been diagnosed with cancer would remind Dylan that time and mortality could not be denied. Beatty Zimmerman would die on 27 January 2000 at the age of 84.
*
In 1999 there had been one moment of clarity in a fog of concerts. That summer, t
empted by Hollywood, Dylan had gone into a New York studio for a day and turned out a recording of a song called ‘Things Have Changed’. Typically, it was better than at least half the stuff on Time Out of Mind, a cynical song from the world’s end that also somehow managed to make sense within the context of the movie for which it had been designed. It made some sense of the era, too. For a change, the film, entitled Wonder Boys, would also be a pretty fair effort. ‘Things Have Changed’ would win Dylan an Academy Award.
Film music had come to his attention, no doubt because it paid very well. The piece he wrote for Wonder Boys cannot be dismissed cynically, however. It is as sharp and penetrating a sketch of human vanity as anything he ever created. The song, compelling proof that he could still write when the need arose, also contains another of those fragments of evidence, if such was still required, that Dylan’s fascination with an apocalyptic ending for humankind had not been extinguished. ‘If the Bible is right,’ as he sang, ‘the world will explode.’ The real point offered in this work is that the speaker, or the artist, couldn’t care less.
People are crazy and times are strange