Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan
Page 59
Ted Turner, the billionaire ‘media mogul’ and founder of CNN, had financed Gods and Generals with tens of millions of dollars from his own pocket. The exact number of millions is open to dispute. By the time the picture was released in February 2003, an original budget of $56 million had grown to what the Los Angeles Times understood to be $90 million; others said anywhere between $60 million and $80 million. In the end, this ‘prequel’ to the movie Gettysburg took just $12.9 million at the box office. Some of the many critics who dismissed the epic as mannered, verbose and far too long would think the receipts generous. One result was that Dylan, apparently intent on a second career as a composer of songs for films, would sacrifice one of his most affecting statements to a risible piece of Southern ancestor worship. Thanks to Tell Tale Signs: Rare and Unreleased 1989–2006, the eighth volume in the Bootleg Series, the song survives and still manages to say more about America’s Civil War in just over eight minutes than Gods and Generals achieved in three hours and forty-nine minutes.
It’s a song without a chorus, dolorous as a funeral march, couched in a fair facsimile of the language of the period, religious yet clear-eyed, and streaked through with the found poetry of historical truth. ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ also manages to be a movie song that is cinematic in its own right. The work is complete and self-contained. It has no need of the picture’s thunderous battle re-enactment scenes, or of promotional videos of famous singers in fright wigs. From verse to verse it moves across ‘the ravaged land’ with a more penetrating gaze than any feature film.
Across the green mountain
I slept by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head
I dreamt a monstrous dream
Something came up
Out of the sea
Swept through the land of
The rich and the free
Dylan’s method is immediately apparent. ‘Heaven blazing in my head’ has been connected by several critics, rightly, to the W.B. Yeats of ‘Lapis Lazuli’, he who speaks of ‘Heaven blazing into the head’. What’s often forgotten is the connection Dylan is making. The next line of the Irishman’s 1938 poem follows a punctuating colon with ‘Tragedy wrought to its uttermost’. In the succeeding verse there is the line ‘Old civilisations put to the sword’, then ‘All things fall and are built again’. This being Dylan, meanwhile, the thing emerging from the sea and a monstrous dream no doubt originate in Revelation 13:1: ‘And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’ This being Dylan, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ formulation, ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’, is shorn of bombast. The ‘land of the rich and free’ has lost its prosperity and liberty to carnage and the beast within. Blasphemy will meanwhile reappear in the song ‘on every tongue’, as though to say that the conflict itself is blasphemous. Yet ‘virtue lives / and cannot be forgot’.
The wonder of the piece is the quantity of imagery Dylan manages to condense. An entire nineteenth-century notion of sacrifice on the ‘altar’ of war, of the ‘good’ Christian death for one’s country, is caught in a few bare lines. Then the entire scene of a coming battle, with all its bathetic pretensions to honour and gentlemanly conduct before the slaughter, is laid out in 20 words.
Altars are burning
with flames far and wide
the foe has crossed over
from the other side
They tip their caps
from the top of the hill
You can feel them come
More brave blood to spill
Throughout the song, Dylan sticks to his brief. Gods and Generals was an attempt both to tell the story of a decisive period in the Civil War and to portray General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, the insanely devout hero of the Confederacy. The song, like the movie, intends to give an idea of vast loss on both sides, but for much of the time, inevitably, its perspective is Southern. Jackson was shot three times by the pickets of his own rebel army towards the end of the battle of Chancellorsville early in May 1863. After an arm was amputated, pneumonia set in and he died of its complications. The South greeted the loss of a brilliantly audacious general with a keening panic. Some historians of the struggle argue, in fact, that Jackson’s death was the war’s turning point. Without his aid, Robert E. Lee was unable to beat the odds at the battle of Gettysburg a few weeks later. After that, it is claimed, the Confederacy’s defeat was inevitable. Dylan’s song takes no interest in any of this. By contrasting veneration and banal, bloody reality, he gives instead a working definition of war’s infinite stupidity.
Close the eyes
of our captain
Peace may he know
His long night is done
The great leader is laid low
He was ready to fall
He was quick to defend
Killed outright he was
by his own men
‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ has the gravitas of a hymnal, the brooding undertones of a graveside eulogy. Dylan’s abraded voice becomes the only conceivable instrument for this kind of mourning. His touring band provide still more evidence, meanwhile, that he has no need to draft in big-name session players. The violin of Larry Campbell and the organ of Benmont Tench are the only counterpoints the lyrics require. Within the words the restless shades of nineteenth-century American poetry move at a steady, ponderous pace. Dylan’s reliable Henry Timrod is there, with both a line from a verse and an echo of the rhetorical style of the poem ‘Charleston’. In part, that reads:
Meanwhile, through streets still echoing with trade,
Walk grave and thoughtful men,
Whose hands may one day wield the patriot’s blade
As lightly as the pen.
Herman Melville’s poem ‘Running the Batteries’ has been heard in Dylan’s song; Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ has been adduced; part of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘Killed at the Ford’ could almost have been one of the verses in the song.
Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill …
Anyone who fails to see the point of the allusions and borrowings, who prefers hunt-the-plagiarist and elects to ‘deconstruct’ a piece of art as though it were a clockwork toy fit only to be taken apart, will find plenty to work with in ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. This is Dylan:
A letter to mother
Came today
‘Gunshot wound to the breast’
Is what it did say
‘But he’ll be better soon
He’s in a hospital bed’
But he’ll never be better
He’s already dead
This is Whitman (from ‘Come Up From the Fields, Father’):
All swims before her eyes, flashes with black, she catches the main words only,
Sentences broken, gunshot wound in the breast, cavalry skirmish, taken to hospital,
At present low, but will soon be better.
Again, Dylan’s ability to edit and condense is startling. Whitman goes on for two more verses before reaching the point:
Alas poor boy, he will never be better, (nor maybe needs to be better,
that brave and simple soul,)
While they stand at home at the door he is dead already …
Dylan’s source is obvious enough, then. What’s worth remembering is that while he intermingles unassuaged grief from both sides of a warring nation – his ‘Captain’ could as well be Lincoln as Jackson – he fuses the poetry of North and South, Whitman and Timrod. Dylan also traces a cultural continuity. His lines ‘Stars fell over Alabama / I saw each star’ are, aptly, a luminous evocation of extinguished Southern lives. But they are also adapted from a 1930s jazz song, ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’. That tune, in turn,
borrowed its title from a book describing a never-forgotten Leonid meteor shower over the state in 1833. The past is in the present; the present is somehow within the past. By its tone the song seems to say, meanwhile, that the war between the states has never truly ended. Grief has never been forgotten; the reasons for grief and enmity have yet to be addressed; nothing is healed. Modern America was born of this conflict and modern America, as Dylan knew perfectly well, remains a house divided against itself.
Finally, there are those verses which, though no doubt unearthed from someone’s prose, become purest Dylan. They leave you to wonder what all the charges of plagiarism can truly mean. So the merest hint from an old jazz song becomes a verse remarkable for its concision and precision. The writer does not have to state all that has been lost. There is a world of mourning in a few words:
Stars fell over Alabama
I saw each star
You’re walking in dreams
Whoever you are
Chilled are the skies
Keen is the frost
The ground’s froze hard
And the morning is lost
*
The government of the United States was threatening war while Dylan was recording ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’. George W. Bush, the latest president, did not mean to be deterred from his ambitions for a conflict in the Middle East, least of all by the facts. An elaborate plot to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for the sake of a strategic incursion was in train. The fiction of an Iraqi dictator’s weapons of mass destruction was being spun out across the media, all outlets. If he cared, Dylan got still more points for prescience: People are crazy and times are strange …
Another movie song, the ancient-sounding one that had plenty to say about futility and loss, had made no comment about the manner in which wars are sometimes contrived, or about the kind of people who fix things so that others do the dying. That had been the younger Dylan’s style. But the older man still knew, as he had known in his youth, that politicians will lie reflexively to achieve their ends. That understanding had never disappeared from Dylan’s thinking and he had not relinquished every right to an opinion. ‘Summer Days’ on the ‘Love and Theft’ album had offered a sour, minor joke:
Politician got on his jogging shoes
He must be running for office, got no time to lose
He been suckin’ the blood out of the genius of generosity
The adventure known simply as ‘Iraq’ would be constructed upon a mound of calculated deceits and do America no credit in the world. Americans themselves would find much of it shameful and most of it troubling. Many citizens of allied countries would feel the same. Worst of all, the war when it came in March 2003 would see all the old ideas of duty, honour and country despoiled by cynics once again. Dylan – patriotic enough and certainly no pacifist – had said all he needed to say in ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ about the terrible things done in virtue’s name. Interviewed in the autumn of 2001, he had tried to make a distinction between being simply ‘anti-war’ – impossible for a supporter of the State of Israel – and his abiding distrust of those who ‘manipulated’ patriotism.
Take ‘Masters of War’. Every time I sing it, someone writes that it’s an anti-war song. I’m not a pacifist. I don’t think I’ve ever been one. If you look closely at the song, it’s about what Eisenhower was saying about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in this country. I believe strongly in everyone’s right to defend themselves by every means necessary …
I think something changed in the country around 1966 or so. You’ll have to look at the history books to really sort it out, but there are people who manipulated the Vietnam war. They were traitors to America, whoever they were. It was the beginning of the corporate take-over of America.6
The one-word debacle called Iraq would be a sharp lesson for those still prepared to learn. The notion that there could be untrammelled American power in a ‘unipolar’ world would be refuted. Grandiose boasts of ‘the second American century’ would come apart like cheap cement amid a welter of excuses. The claim that democratic ‘values’ could be pressed on peoples whose desire for liberation was taken for granted would dissolve in the keen light of reality. Meanwhile, the ‘corporate take-over’ would be extended to the very business of war-making as private enterprises made fortunes from Pentagon contracts, much as fortunes had been made during the Civil War. In Iraq, the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower’s nightmare, would emerge defiantly from the shadows. Yet when the official lies became too obvious to ignore, trust in America’s government would be shaken once again. For the last superpower and for those still attempting to redeem history, Vietnam above all, Iraq would become a bloody mess. Dylan gazed upon all of this with the eyes of one who regarded war as fallen mankind’s perpetual condition. Bloody Chancellorsville or irradiated Fallujah: the only real difference was that in the modern atrocity Americans were not killing one another.
You cannot assemble an opinion on Dylan’s behalf just from the evidence of his public statements. He has had decades in which to master the arts of evasion and self-contradiction. You must go to the art instead. He appears always to say that it is beside the point for some mere singer to pontificate, that poetry, as W.H. Auden insisted, ‘makes nothing happen’. All the wars meanwhile say that humankind isn’t altered in the slightest by art, however passionate, however moving, however true. That had been the youngster’s insight in the ’60s. Protest songs made people feel better about themselves, but they didn’t truly change anything. The cities of the western world would erupt in protest against the Iraq conspiracy. Brave songs would be sung and brave words spoken, but the military machine would roll on regardless. Besides, if you cleave to Revelation, as Dylan does, your belief in immutable prophecy is liable to make everything else seem like trivia. But.
The coincidences that saw this artist writing Masked and Anonymous and ‘’Cross the Green Mountain’ within the same brief span allow for the sketching of a rough composite picture of part of Dylan’s thinking. The idea of a war in the Middle East no doubt revived a few of his high-definition apocalyptic fantasies. Nevertheless, his movie said he had a precise idea of the forces at work within his country. His movie song said he had understood what becomes of essential humanity when it is exposed to pitiless warfare. Together, two overlooked works testified to the fact that, despite everything, he was clear-eyed and undeceived. Radical, too.
*
In October 2002, as though for the hell of it, Dylan’s performances in concert began to amount to something again. Whether this was because he had taken to playing the electric piano on stage, or because he had begun to tackle other people’s songs more often than before, there was a vitality to the shows, first on the American west coast and then in the east, that had not been evident in years. Renditions of works by Warren Zevon, who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, became a speciality. Dylan had not known the writer of ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ and ‘Werewolves of London’ especially well. He had played a little harmonica at a Zevon session in 1987, but did not claim to be a friend. Nevertheless, it seems the artist felt compelled to honour a dying man whose work he admired by performing his songs, often three in a night, at show after show.
As more than one Dylan fan noticed, he took pains to get his performances right when works that were not his own fell into his care. Amid all the exculpatory talk of ‘reinvention’, few had paused to ask how many times the feat could be attempted or accomplished with Dylan songs that were 30 and 40 years old. This would be his 15th year out on the road in a touring programme that had been interrupted just once, unavoidably, by the histoplasmosis infection scare. What was left to be squeezed from ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ or ‘It’s Alright, Ma’? So it was that on 19 October the crowd at San Diego State University heard not only Zevon’s ‘Mutineer’ but Van Morrison’s ‘Carrying a Torch’, Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’, Buddy Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’ and, remarkably, a version of the Rolling Stones’ �
��Brown Sugar’. Arguably, the last of these was the best of the lot. Dylan was testing himself with songs he didn’t know inside out, asleep or awake, in every conceivable improvised variant reading. It did him a power of good to sing what others had written.
For all that, the exercise also served to prove that he was once again in need of new material. Each of the songs of ‘Love and Theft’ had by this point been performed in concert, with varying degrees of success. Dylan was meanwhile turning to a few of his less-obvious older pieces to keep the customers satisfied. But if the tour never-ending had truly won him a new audience, the customers seemed strangely content with the same core set of the same old songs from the ’60s at show upon show. Perhaps, in the main, they were the same old customers. Still there was no sign of a new album. It seemed that Dylan could happily produce work if there was a Hollywood cheque attached, but could not be galvanised by any other means.
The consolation for fans late in 2002 was the release of The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue. It was a very fine double CD set that nevertheless managed to annoy a few people by giving only a partial and misleading account of a typical revue concert. The album, a memento of idealism and high passion long gone, was nevertheless the best Dylan had to offer. For all his complaints about bootleggers, the appeal of ‘rare and unreleased’ recordings was his sole commercial proposition in the absence of new work. The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 would sell in respectable quantities, neither a golden goose nor a turkey.
In January 2003, Masked and Anonymous received its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah and went to meet its maker. Dylan was at risk, not for the first time, of becoming a world-famous cult figure. He toured Australia and New Zealand once again, went through the Southern American states in April and May, covered most of the rest of the country in July and August, reached Europe in October … And so on. If touring was not just a job, it looked very like one. On 12 September, after a good deal of hard living and the loss of his beloved and stalwart wife June, Johnny Cash died in Nashville at the age of 71. Dylan prepared still another of his eulogies. This one was longer and more heartfelt than most.